In the Lies of Celestial Intent
by BlackIceWitch
Summary: Apocalypse Series Book 3. AU 2013. The Grigori have been shattered but a rogue archangel still hides from Heaven and the settlements under the protection of the hunters are facing peril as the world changes and the first-born monsters search for surviving populations to turn and destroy. For Dean, the choice will always between what he must do and what he wants. No slash.
1. Chapter 1 Life Among the Dead

**Chapter 1 Life Among the Dead**

* * *

><p><em><strong>Heaven, October 1, 2013<strong>_

"They are still hiding, somewhere in the Forbidden City," Gabriel said tiredly to his brother, leaning back against the alabaster pillar behind him. "We can't see in and the place is ringed with traps."

"What about those who were marching from Europe?" Michael asked.

"Their army was destroyed when Winchester closed the gates." Gabriel shrugged slightly. "We could see them as far east as Istanbul."

"Camael will not give up on the tablet now."

"No." Castiel agreed, walking into the marble hall, the leather soles of his vessel's shoes clicking on the hard floor. "And the Grigori will not giving up on returning home."

"We need the tablet," Gabriel said, looking at the angel with a lifted brow. "And from your empty hands, I'm going to take a wild guess that Dean declined to acquiesce to your request for help."

"Yes," Cas said tersely. "Strangely, he thought that Heaven should clean up its own messes, instead of leaving it for them all the time," he added, looking between the archs.

"There was nothing more I could do!" Michael said, getting to his feet. "We were fighting here too!"

Cas looked away and Gabriel hid a smirk at the angel's lack of contrition. Things had changed in ways that Michael couldn't keep up with, he thought.

"What does he want?" Michael asked, brows drawing together as he noticed Gabriel's averted gaze.

"To be left alone, for some time, at least," Cas said heavily. "Without the horde, the Grigori have no armies, other than their spells for animating the dead. That has severe limitations."

"You think we should leave them to their own devices?" Gabriel asked, his voice rising in disbelief. "Knowing that they will not give up?"

"It will take them time to find the dead, time to get across the countries that lie between them and the tablet," Cas reasoned. "And Camael is – should be – our highest priority. What do we have in the library?"

"The library, thanks to our brother, is encased in a semi-solid substance that we are still looking for ways to remove," Michael told him. "And we have not seen the scribe since he vanished from the Grigori base in Utah. He is completely shielded now–"

"He must have carved the sigils into his construct, or found a new vessel," Gabriel interjected.

"–and we have no means of locating him," Michael finished with a sour look at his brother.

Any more than they'd had for locating Metatron when he'd disappeared, Castiel thought irritably as he looked around the enormous chamber. More than five hundred million years they had been the guardians and watchers of this small planet, among all the others their Father had created, and they had raised themselves above those they had been created to serve, and had fallen further than the lowliest of them.

"The first children of the creators are still free on the planet," he said abruptly, turning back to them. "We should be helping deal with those dangers to humanity. Helping to find the other tablets."

Michael shook his head. "Camael, although treacherous enough, is not the mind behind what has happened here, Castiel, and you know that to be true," he said, one wing lifting. "I will not leave here until we have routed out every traitor and the architect of this rebellion."

"That could take years!" Cas burst out, looking from Michael to Gabriel. "We didn't even know about the conspiracy until after Lucifer was free!"

"Quieten yourself, little brother," Gabriel said softly. "Even these walls have ears."

"Only an arch has the power to have achieved what has been done here," Cas hissed at him. "Are you confessing, Gabriel?"

The archangel's face darkened for a moment, the feathers of his wings shimmering from grey to black. Cas felt his heart stutter in his chest and took a step backward.

"Gabriel." Michael's deep baritone cut through the thickening silence. "Camael was the only archangel involved, Castiel," he said to the seraphim. "We all walked the Path of Truth when we found out."

"It doesn't take power to manipulate minds, little brother," Gabriel said coldly. "Only fine words. And there are plenty capable of those in the upper hierarchy, arch or not."

"Are you going to sit up here and wait for them to show themselves forever?" Cas asked.

"No." Michael shook his head decisively. "No, we will lay a trap, we will spread rumours of the tablet and wait to see who emerges."

"This has been a plan forty thousand years in the making, Michael," Cas said, staring at him. "Do you think that will work with those who have managed to hide themselves for so long?"

Michael smiled humourlessly. "It will be a trap within a trap, Castiel. It will not be seen and it will not be smelled. Have faith."

Cas turned away as the archangels disappeared, leaving the sound of beating wings and the smell of flowers and feathers behind him. Among the many ranks of the seraph, there were only few who could have plotted this long and this deeply, he thought. He hoped that Michael and Gabriel were aware that no matter how well laid their traps were, it was possible they'd already been seen laying them out.

He walked slowly down the length of the long room, chin tucked into his chest as he thought of what he might be able to do to help his friends to deal with the problems that had been left-over after the last war.

Those first-born of the dark goddess were as invisible to him as the Grigori or Camael. He couldn't help the Winchesters without the aid of the seers and those had their priorities straight from the commander of the Host.

He had attempted to heal Alex, to restore her memories, thinking it was the least he could for Dean. But whatever had happened to her in the four months that she'd been held by the Grigori, it had built walls of steel around her mind, and protected by her soul, he'd been powerless to break through. The notes of Grigori on their infernal machines and spells to create the living clones had been fragments only, and even the oldest scholars in the mountains dividing France from Spain had only learned that the procedure was extremely painful, an invasion of the nervous system and blood vessels, musculature and skeleton, not what it had actually entailed.

Sighing deeply, he turned automatically right as he reached the doors at the end of the chamber, heading for the library. If they could remove the gelatinous muck that Camael had drowned it in, there might something in there that he could take back to Kansas, something that would further the studies of the order, if nothing else.

* * *

><p><em><strong>Maine, 3 October, 2013<strong>_

Dean watched the greenish light as it bounced across the marsh, its erratic movements seemingly alive and deliberate. It wasn't, he knew, just the odd, electrical discharges in the shallow ponds and soaks. Marsh-feys, Bobby had called them, the first time they'd stayed with him and he'd taken them out one night in late summer when the activity had been particularly strong. Sam had fallen for the story hook, line and sinker, and he'd believed it until he'd stepped off the trail and into a bog and had been zapped by the small charge, his leg tingling for minutes afterward.

They had no fire, not wanting to wreck their vision. On the other side of the narrow, reasonably solid trail, his brother was sitting cross-legged, watching the trailing lights and listening to the pops and gurgles of the water-soaked land surrounding them. In the very dim starlight, he could just make out the outline of Sam's hair, one edge of a cheekbone.

"Tilly said this was the right place?" Sam's voice ghosted from the darkness and Dean let out an exhale. This was the longest period of silence his brother had managed, a bit over an hour.

"Yeah, this is it," he said, pushing himself into a sitting position and waiting.

"What time she'd say the attack was?"

"Just after midnight," Dean answered shortly.

Silence filled the marsh again, broken by the soft noises of the water and saturated soil and Dean thought he might have been spared round eleven, but no, he heard the inhale from Sam's direction and rubbed a hand over his eyes, waiting for it.

"What you're doing is gutless, Dean."

A new tactic, he thought, ignoring the spurt of annoyance that rose with the words, with his brother's pushing, with his own inability to move in any direction at all.

"Make sure you tell me what you really think, Sam," he said, injecting a note of derision into his voice. "Don't hold back."

"I understand you're scared, but this isn't the way to deal with it," Sam pressed on and Dean saw his head turn toward him. "It's really her and those are your kids –"

"Sam, shut it."

Sam hesitated at the change in his brother's tone and voice, then shook his head. "No. She needs you. They need you."

Dean made a noise at the back of his throat. "She doesn't need me. She doesn't _know_ me."

"Think that'll improve by what you're doing?"

"Conversation's over," Dean said succinctly, turning away.

"No, it's not." Sam looked at his back frustratedly. "I lost Jess and don't you think I would have given anything to have a second chance at–"

"She died once!" Dean snapped, shoulders hunching in his jacket. "Don't tell me you know what's going on with me – you don't!"

"How can I?" Sam asked caustically. "You don't tell anyone–"

"With good fucking reason," Dean growled, getting to his feet. "I'm gonna check the other side, use the flare if you see it."

"Dean, don't be more of an ass –"

"Fuck, what do you want from me?" Dean swung around and stared down at him. "How much do you think I've got left?"

"I know," Sam said quickly, raising his hands. "I know. That's exactly why – you were different then, Dean, you found something that you –"

"Leave me the fuck alone, Sam," he snapped, turning away again, walking fast along the sodden ground with his boots squelching in the thick mud. None of this was helping, none of it.

It should have been a happy ending, he thought, alive and in one piece, both of them, but no, it was a Winchester story and when had any of them ever gotten a happy ending? Every time he saw her, he was suffocated by what he wanted, by the memories of what he'd had, and when she'd looked at him, her gaze polite and not knowing him at all, it was all wiped away, as completely and thoroughly as if it'd never existed. It had torn him down and he couldn't do it again.

The faint splash to his left dragged his attention back to the marsh and he stopped, hand going to the long, silver knife in his belt as another splash, a little closer, sent ripples through the dark water to the shallow bank at his feet.

Two of them, he thought, facing the direction of the splash, but aware through some other sense, that prickled along the back of his neck, of the stealthy movement behind him. He swung around, the blade drawn and slicing in a short arc that stopped with a thud and a piercing shriek. Dropping, he felt the creature's arm and the tip of the point of the spike that protruded from its wrist brush across his hair and staggered forward into it, one boot stuck in the vacuum suction of the thick mud as he tried to rise, his arm whipping around the long, thin neck and dragging it back against the point of his knife.

Long, bony fingers dug into his scalp, and Dean struggled to free the stuck foot as he felt his balance pulled backwards. Yanking the knife free of the first wraith, he swung it awkwardly behind him, hearing a low chuckle and a much bigger splash of the water in the pond, then he was under it, his boot finally breaking free of the bog as hands pressed over his face and chest and drove him down to the bottom.

His arm moved sluggishly through the water, driving toward the creature above him, his lungs aching with the little air in them as he tried to see through the murk for his target. _Not getting drowned in two feet of water by some lightweight swamp monster_, he thought desperately, the ache gradually morphing into a burn as his muscles used up more of the oxygen in them, his movements becoming jerky and out of his control. _Not going to fucking well happen_, he told himself, reaching for anger, for rage to counteract the growing darkness that was limiting his vision.

The hands and weight were gone suddenly, and he twisted himself slowly over, pushing down against the thick, slimy mud at the bottom and barely breaking the surface before he'd opened his mouth to suck down the chilled night air.

"Dean!"

His brother's voice, and Sam splashing toward him, a big hand grabbing a handful of wet clothing and dragging him right out.

"Dean, you there?"

He nodded, getting his feet under him and stumbling out of the pond with Sam's arm wrapped around his ribs. Wincing, he felt a cut just below and behind his ear, and he lifted his fingers to touch it, looking at the dark liquid that came away on them.

"Thanks," he muttered as they reached the semi-firm bank. "Close."

"Too close," Sam snapped, ducking slightly to get Dean's arm over his shoulders and straightening again to take more of his weight. "You were under the water for minutes."

It hadn't felt like minutes, Dean thought, but then he hadn't felt the spike either. He sucked in a deep lungful of air and felt it fill him, flushing out the build-up of poisons from the lack of it.

"I'm okay," he told Sam, slowing and inhaling and exhaling again. He realised he didn't have his knife and looked behind them. "Fuck."

"What?"

"Dropped my knife," he said, half-turning to go back to look for it. Sam's arm tightened around his wrist, stopping him.

"No, leave it," he said sharply, pulling his brother toward the edge of the marsh and the truck they'd come in. "Maybe it'll poison the water enough to keep any others from here."

"I can walk," Dean said mildly, pivoting around and moving with him.

"Yeah, well, consider this your hug for the year," Sam said shortly. "What the hell happened?"

Dean flicked a glance at him. "There were two of them."

"So?" Sam grunted. "You've taken on more than that before and come out without nearly drowning."

"Where the hell were you anyway?" Dean asked, not interested in examining why two had been able to take him down.

"I was dealing with the two others who came out of the water," his brother told him.

"Didn't think they hunted in groups."

For a moment, he thought Sam was going to ask him again what had happened, but he didn't, just pulled in a deep breath and kept walking.

* * *

><p><em><strong>Lebanon, Kansas<strong>_

The truck slowed as they approached the high walls that surrounded what had once been a small town and now was a fortified keep.

"You want to stay at the order tonight?" Sam asked.

Dean looked at the walls and shook his head. "No, drop me off at Ghost Valley, I'll stay at the farmhouse tonight, get a car and go to the keep tomorrow."

He saw Sam's mouth thin out by the light of the dash and looked away as his brother shifted down and made the left hand turn along the outer wall.

"It's not like you to run," Sam said as the truck bounced along the gravelled road and headed down into the valley.

He was right about that, Dean thought tiredly, not bothering to respond. It wasn't like him to try to ignore the responsibility he felt pounding with his pulse every time he was in the keep either.

Sam drove up to the tall, iron gates that led to the farmhouse and waited for the night-guards to open them, both men unwinding their windows and sticking arms out for the usual battery of tests. Holy water was still on the list.

"Staying here tonight, Dean?" Gerry asked, screwing the cap back onto the bottle.

"Yeah, I wanted to catch Riley," Dean nodded. "You got any spare rides here?"

"Three, down past the harvesters," Gerry confirmed, nodding in the direction.

"Won't need to come get me," Dean said to Sam as he pulled out and headed for the farmyard.

"What time you going to be at the order?"

"I don't know." Dean opened the door as the truck stopped. "I need to talk to Jackson as well. Chuck had any more visions?"

Sam shook his head. "No, he's still working on the tablet but it's mostly histories now."

"Good."

He rapped twice on the door with his knuckles and turned away, not looking back as he crossed to the wide porch steps and climbed them. The truck turned in a circle, the engine's low chug bouncing a little from the buildings that surrounded the dirt yard then fading as Dean opened the front door.

"Thought that might be you," Riley said, standing in the doorway to the living room. "Did you get the critters?"

"Yeah, okay if I crash here tonight?"

"Sure." The lanky farmer's eyes narrowed a little. "You eaten?"

Dean shook his head, pulling off the dark blue jacket that still reeked faintly of mud.

"'Becca's still in the kitchen if you want something."

"Thanks," he said, walking down the hall to the kitchen and laundry. He could get it all washed here, he thought. "When do you plant the winter crops?"

"This week or next, we'll see how the weather's doing," Riley said over his shoulder, turning back into the living room. "Got out of that last year, don't think I'm going to look the other way again."

The comment lifted one side of Dean's mouth as he kept walking and turned into the big, square kitchen at the end of the hall.

* * *

><p>By the stove, Rebecca turned to look at him. "You hungry?"<p>

"Yeah," he said, stopping as she walked over to him. He stepped back a little defensively as her nose wrinkled up when she was a couple of feet away. "Guess I should probably wash these first."

She gave him a rueful smile. "There're spare clothes down in the bathroom. Leave those on the floor and I'll put them through tonight."

He nodded and walked through the kitchen to the door at the rear. The laundry was another big room, with a smaller bath off one side, and as promised, several pairs of clean jeans and shirts were stacked on a chair in the corner. He pulled off his clothes and dumped them on the floor, reaching into the shower to turn on the taps.

Pressure was good. Heat was good. He didn't smell quite like the creature from the black lagoon anymore. Underneath the acknowledgement of the purely physical, he was aware that what his brother had said was still agitating under his conscious thoughts, despite his best efforts to bury it all. Getting out, he dried himself and pulled on the clean clothes.

* * *

><p>In the kitchen, a plate of roasted meat and vegetables sat on the table, along with a half a loaf of bread and a pot of butter. He sat down and ate hungrily, barely noticing the woman who moved quietly around the kitchen.<p>

"You staying tonight?" Rebecca asked, picking up his plate as he finished and setting a beer down beside him.

He looked up in surprise, half-getting up to take the dish to the sink himself, and subsiding as she waved a hand impatiently at him.

"Yeah, uh. Thanks, you didn't have to hang around," he said awkwardly.

"Riley said you and Sam took care of something in South Dakota?" She put the dishes in the sink and ran water over them, turning to lean back against the bench and wiping her hands on the plain apron that covered her dress.

_Something_, he thought disparagingly, tipping up the bottle and swallowing a mouthful. "Yep."

She smiled at him and gestured around the room. "Consider this a thank you for looking out for us, then."

He ducked his head at the words, staring down at the table. Five years ago, the sentiment – and the food, and the company – would've been gratefully received. Five years ago, he'd been someone else entirely.

"How come you're still here?" he asked, glancing up at her as he finished the beer. "You were a teacher, weren't you?"

She nodded, untying the apron and hanging it on the hook by the door.

"I'd've thought – uh, I'd've thought someone would've had you teaching long before now," he said, getting up and tossing the bottle in the trash.

Turning back to him, Rebecca shrugged. "A lot's been going on, I thought I'd be more useful here for awhile." She walked across the room to him.

Closing the cupboard that hid the trash can, he turned and found her right in front of him, looking up at him with a small smile playing around her mouth. He squashed the irritation he felt rising as he recognised the intention behind the expression.

"If you wanted some company tonight, I'd be happy to oblige," she said softly, taking a step closer.

Dean forced a smile and stepped back. "Thanks, for the food, and the, uh, offer, but no."

A slight frown drew her brows together. "You're not –"

"'Bec, you doin' that laundry tonight or is Pat?" Riley said from the doorway and Dean felt a sneaking trickle of relief that the conversation had been diverted. He'd attempted to find a straight physical release just once in the last six months. It'd been a failure of epic proportions, not so much in the execution as in the result. He'd had more satisfaction and less disappointment in taking care of himself. He took another step back and turned.

"That's mine, I'll do it," he said quickly, heading for the door.

"No. I'll do it," Rebecca said sharply, staring at Riley.

"Good, 'cause I need to talk to you," Riley said to Dean, eyes crinkling a little as they followed Rebecca's stiff-backed progress out of the kitchen.

Dean stepped back as Rebecca walked past him to the door and followed Riley down the hall to the living room.

"Better lock your door tonight," the lean farmer said, picking up the bottle of whiskey and pouring an inch into each of the two glasses on the sideboard. "With some people, no doesn't always mean no."

* * *

><p>Dean looked at the thumb lock on the door of the bedroom for a moment then shrugged inwardly and turned it. Didn't need any more hassles today, he decided as he walked toward the bed.<p>

He hadn't had a home since he'd gotten back from Colorado. Most of his personal belongings were still in the apartment. He'd grabbed a couple of bags of clothes after seeing her and they were still sitting in the trunk of the old Nova he'd borrowed from Bobby six weeks ago, parked at the keep. He'd been sleeping wherever he'd ended up for the day, or wherever he needed to be the following morning, on the move, going out looking for survivors, for supplies, training those who'd lived through the experience of being possessed by demons and sent into war by the Grigori, bending his brain along with everyone at the order to figure out the location of the monster tablet, because the first born monsters were still out there and they wouldn't be sitting still.

_Running_, he thought abruptly, pulling the soft feather-filled quilt over him. That was the short version of what he'd been doing.

_I don't quit and I'm not running. I'm not like you._

The words, his words, came back to him and he rolled over, eyes squeezing shut as he tried to get away from that memory. After he'd found out what had happened to her, he'd thought she'd had a damned good reason for running.

_I understand you're scared_, Sam had said. But he hadn't understood. He wasn't scared it wasn't her. He was scared that it was, he admitted to himself. He couldn't rid himself of the memories and what those discrete seconds of time had done.

For a few minutes he lay on his side, breathing silently, unaware of what he was doing. Then the knowledge seeped into him and he curled up, fists clenched and muscles contracted, his jaw tight with trying to hold back the pain.

If she'd known him, he thought he might've been able to get past those memories, overlaid them with new ones, taken away their power with what he wanted to see in her eyes when she looked at him. _And did she? Still?_

_No._ She didn't.

She didn't know him. That was gone and it would've been bearable, he could've handled it if he could've just let go. But he could no more do that than he could stop listening, for the sound he was sure would be there, for that soft whisper of breath beside him.

* * *

><p><em><strong>Litteris Hominae safehold, Kansas<strong>_

Sam stopped the truck in front of the huge oak tree in the middle of the forest and let out a deep breath. Felix had found the safehold's blueprints, and Franklin's apprentices, Tony and Milo, had rebuilt the door. All of them had worked on replacing and adding to the illusions and wards and guards, to deflect the eyes of mortal and immortal. The thick forest and the oak and the fear spells that were making his nerves jitter uncontrollably and his muscles twitch in alarm. Back to normal.

He got out of the truck and walked to the oak, and the illusions fell aside as the locking rings clunked and thunked inside the rock wall and the door opened. The rush of air past him from the interior held the scents of the open fire, burning some sweet wood, food, paper, more faintly herbs and gun oil and solvent. Mitch looked up at him.

"How'd you do?"

"Four of them, in the ponds," Sam commented as he walked inside, shifting the gear bag from one hand to the other. "How's Chuck?"

"Sleeping at the moment," Mitch told him, closing the door behind the tall hunter, the locks sliding into place and the rings turning on their own. "We've got about fifty years of work getting all of it into a single repository, Jerome says."

"Keep you busy." Sam walked down the iron staircase.

At the bottom of the stairs, in the situation room, Jerome glanced over his shoulder, nodding at Sam, the computer screens behind him lighting half his face brightly. Sam glanced at the lit-up table as he passed. The markers for the tablets were still flashing. They had the general vicinity of each one but zooming in closer produced a much fuzzier location and pinpointing the locations to within a square mile was impossible. They'd discovered the location of the Arctic tablet, though, at least to a much smaller search zone.

"Any word from Michel or the Qaddiysh?" he asked Jerome.

The legacy shook his head. "Michel has been trying to separate the frequencies from the background noise but so far, nada," he said, leaning back in the wheelchair. "And Jordan has been completely silent."

"Rethinking helping us?"

"I don't know," Jerome said, glancing up at him as he stopped beside the long curving desktop. "Penemue insisted that they would help."

"Maybe it's not up to him." Sam looked up into the library.

"Maybe," Jerome agreed, smiling as he saw the direction of the hunter's gaze. "Marla's upstairs."

Sam looked at him, the corner of his mouth lifting slightly as he acknowledged the man's percipience. "Thanks."

"Bobby and Rufus called a meeting at the keep," Jerome added as Sam started up the shallow steps to the library. "They asked for you and Dean and the other hunters."

"Know what it's about?" Sam paused at the top of the steps, looking back.

"No." The legacy turned back to the screens and Sam walked into the library, breathing in the old book smell deeply, feeling in it a peculiar sense of home.

The tables were empty, the fire crackling in the big stone hearth and Katherine, Felix and Jasper looked up from their curled positions in the armchairs surrounding the fire, nodding at him as he passed by, piles of books surrounding them.

He continued on to the door at the end of the long, high room, turning left to the hallway that led to the stairs. He was hungry, but food could wait, he thought, climbing to the floor above, unconsciously moving a little faster as he neared the bedroom next to the top of the stairs.

Opening the heavy timber door, he saw Marla sitting in the armchair beside the small fire, her son cradled against her, head tipped back and eyes closed. He closed the door and she looked up, and her small smile sent a shaft of contentment through him, dissolving the difficulties and memories of the last three days completely as he crossed the room and dumped the gear bag, leaning on the arm of the chair to kiss her.

"You look tired," she said softly, lifting a hand to push the fall of hair from his forehead as he crouched next to the chair.

"Sitting in a bog for hours on end, not as much fun as it used to be," he remarked dryly, looking down at the baby in her arms. "Everything been okay here?"

"Yes," she said, following his gaze, her face softening. "He's full and dry and ready for a long sleep."

He rose as she did, watching her go to the small, unadorned cot and settle the infant inside it.

When he'd returned to the keep, she'd been in labour. The baby was Oliver's, the result of a single night when Ninhursag had walked along the border between Kansas and Missouri, not to be repeated and aside from deepening the friendly affection between the two of them, apparently having no other long-lasting effects. Oliver, she'd told him carefully, wasn't interested in women as a general rule. Sam had confirmed that with the man a few days later.

"_You have to try everything once, right?" the young apothecary specialist had said with a shrug. "And it wasn't like there was a choice, that night, but no, not really cut out for it myself." He'd looked up at Sam. "She's a good lady, Sam. And I think she's been waiting for you for awhile."_

He'd been a little afraid to approach her afterward, but she'd smiled and kissed him, had held him as he'd told her about his life and the contract. She had read the Winchesters and Campbell histories. He'd given them to her before he'd left for the third trial, after he'd added his own story to the chronicles. Handing them over, he'd watched her face, seeing his fear of her reaction to that knowledge reflected there. He'd done too much he'd been ashamed of and he'd known it was a risk. But he'd clung to a hope that whatever it was between them, was strong enough to understand, strong enough to handle the truth. That was all he wanted now.

He would need to update them again, detailing the trials and all that had changed him over their course, he thought, moving his bag to the small bathroom. In some ways, it would finalise everything. At least, he hoped it would.

The blood was gone. He was just a normal man now.

Drawing the curtain around the cot, Marla looked over her shoulder at him.

"Come and eat," she said quietly. "Did you get through to Dean?"

He made a face, shaking his head. "No. When do I ever?" he said, looking down at his stiff clothes and catching the unlovely smell of marsh water from them. "I need to get cleaned up. I'll meet you down there."

A moment later, standing under the hot water, he wondered how long it was going to take him to get over the novelty of being close to someone who knew all about him. They hadn't extended the emotional closeness to a physical one yet, the aftermath of giving birth and the chaos of the army's return and everything else precluding that effectively. But, he thought, a shiver running through him, that would change soon.

* * *

><p><em><strong>West Keep, Kansas<strong>_

Rufus walked down the curving stone and concrete staircase, feeling his knees creak and pop. _Getting too old for this shit_, he thought wryly. The mornings were icy in what was basically a castle, central heating notwithstanding, and it took a little longer to get everything warmed up and working the way it was supposed to as the year turned and the days got shorter and colder.

It wasn't just the cold that was making him feel old, he knew, turning as he reached the second floor and walking down the hall toward the back stairs that led down to the hunter's offices. They'd lost too many friends over the last four years, too many good people and there were times when he walked through the keep, or down to the courtyards, the expectation of seeing Franklin or Tim, Maggie or Emmett with Max dogging the man's heels … even Father Michael or Pastor Gideon, and being surprised again when he remembered that they weren't there, weren't coming back. The keep had its ghosts and although they were benign, living among the dead was an unsettling experience and one that made him feel every one of his years.

He slowed as he heard voices ahead, stopping by the stairs when he saw the tall, dark-haired man talking to Alex in the hall. Drew was leaning close to the still too-thin woman, and Rufus frowned as he saw her look up and smile at the ex-cop, gesturing lightly with one hand, the other arm curled around the child in her arms.

Alex back from the dead was almost as unsettling as the ever-present ghosts of those who had died, he realised, leaning back against the wall beside him as he watched the distant interaction. The initial relief that she'd lived had been swamped by the difficult recognition that to all intents and purposes the woman he'd known was not there, was still dead. He wasn't the only one feeling the impossibility of the situation.

Turning away from them, he kept walking to the stairs, wondering what the hell would happen if Alex just made a new life with someone else.

* * *

><p>"We lost eleven hundred men in Colorado, and we've picked up –" Bobby turned to look at Maria, who stood stiffly near the desk.<p>

"Thirteen hundred and ninety-eight men and women," she answered, checking the figures in the notepad she held.

"Thirteen hundred and ninety-eight from the remains of the army and over the past four weeks," he continued, looking around the packed room. "We're still a little short on accommodation but that's your problem, Jackson," he added, nodding at the farmer who sat to one side of him. "Ours is that we need to get people trained up, need to get out there 'cause the head vamp is out there now, and probably one or two other alpha monsters who're looking just as hard for anyone who's made it through the last few years as we are."

Dean leaned back against the shelves, looking absently around the room. His brows drew together slightly as he registered the numbers of new faces there, and belatedly noted all the ones he'd expected to see but couldn't. Boze was in Tawas, recovering still and Sean was there as well, had taken over the camp in the interim. Jo and Ty sat on the sofa, representing both Michigan camps since Tim was gone. Ellen was looking after her infants and granddaughters, at Lightning Oak, not nearly as annoyed by the exclusion as he'd thought she'd be. Franklin's second, Tony, was there, instead of the short, sour-faced ex-soldier. He recognised the trainees, now regarded more as juniors than raw recruits, grouped together at the back. The frown deepened as his gaze passed over Maria and Freddie. Jackson had said something about the two of them that morning, taking over the day-to-day organisation and communications for all of the keeps in Kansas. It was another reminder of what he spent a considerable amount of time trying not to think about.

"For right now, we got two priorities," Bobby was saying and Dean dragged his thoughts back to the old man. They'd already gone over this earlier, this was the briefing for the troops, but he figured it didn't look too good for him to be sitting there vaguing out through Bobby's speech.

"We're sending a joint team to the Arctic – us and the French chapter – to find what we're pretty sure is the monster tablet," Bobby said. "Kelly, Jack, Billy and Danielle, you'll be meeting up with Marc in what used to be Arkhangelsk, on the White Sea."

The hunters nodded. The signal they'd had for the tablet had finally been correlated with a known geological event, and it had narrowed the search area to within a half mile square. They would be battling across Canada in the middle of winter, but hoped to reach the Arctic island in the spring.

"Second priority is training," Bobby kept going, glancing at Rufus. "We need teams going out until the weather shuts us down, need stuff we can't make, need to find any survivors we can. Jo, we'll be sending a bunch of folks over with you."

Dean saw her exchange a glance with Ty then nod to Bobby. She was definitely no longer a kid, he thought. Life had etched its lines into her face, and her eyes were cool and appraising now.

Jackson cleared his throat. "We also need a lot of people training for the essential work here in the keeps and we're gonna have to double up on the defensive soldiering for the keeps while most of the hunters are out looking for people. Anyone not involved in the teams gets a schedule to start folk in weaponry, handling the artillery we got here, the legends and lore of whatever we might expect to see looking to get more recruits and whatever the hell else you can think of."

Looking around at the tense and apprehensive expressions, Dean felt a fleeting flash of pity for them. Many of them had woken on a battlefield, after being ridden by a demon for several weeks, and none of them had the look of a good night's sleep yet.

"Maria, Freddie, Tony and Deidre have the lists for the teams that are going out," Bobby said into the silence. "See 'em and get yourselves organised."

* * *

><p>"Well, scared the crap out of them," Dean said when the room had cleared and Bobby, Elias, Rufus, Sam and him were all that were left.<p>

Bobby looked at him from under the brim of his cap. "Didn't even tell them the good stuff."

"Thrill me."

"Elias?" Bobby flicked a look at the auburn-haired hunter and reached for the bottle.

"Brought back twenty four people yesterday," Elias said, looking at Dean. "There would've been more but there were three vamps feeding off them when we got there, and we lost ten before we got them."

"Where?" Dean asked.

"Clarksdale, Mississippi."

"What were you doing there?" Sam asked, brow furrowing as he tried to remember the area.

"Looking for people," Elias said, taking the glass Bobby offered him. "Thought some of the people who made it out of Atlanta might've headed south, weather being bad in the winters north lately."

Dean felt his brother's gaze on him. "We could take a couple of trucks, go have a look around."

"You think the alpha's gonna be there?" Rufus looked at him. "Can you still feel it?"

Dean shook his head. "No, but from what those women said, about the cell the fallen were holding him in, sounded like he preferred the heat to the cold, didn't it?"

Jane had told them everything about the prison under the Grigori base, and the others had verified it. The fallen had freed the firstborn vampire a few months before Nintu had gotten to the mountains.

"We need to go back to that base," Sam said abruptly. "Need to look for what they were doing."

"Yeah," Dean agreed immediately, the idea coalescing a number of possible benefits. "There's probably a helluva lot of information that the angel and the Qaddiysh didn't think to look for."

"Who do you want to take?" Rufus asked, leaning back in the chair and looking at him over the rim of his glass. "I could use a break from all the paperwork."

"What about Usiku?" Bobby looked from Rufus to Dean questioningly. "If he's south, you're going in the wrong direction."

"We still think that taking down the firstborn will be a matter of getting their blood?" Sam asked him. "Like the werewolf?"

"No," Dean said, not sure why he felt certain of that. "I think each of them has a different vulnerability. We didn't need the blood of the skinwalker to kill it," he added, looking at Rufus and rubbing his side reflexively. Rufus scowled at him.

"I don't know," he said. "Maybe it's a question of strength. Skinwalkers don't rate next to werewolves. They hunt in packs for a reason."

"Maybe." Dean swallowed the contents of his glass and put it on the table. "Utah first," he decided. "Rufus, Sam and me. We'll be back as soon as we can."

Bobby nodded. "I'll let Jackson know."

* * *

><p>Alex sat in the armchair, looking at Dr Malley. "It's not like memories, it's just a feeling of familiarity."<p>

"There's no visible damage to the lobes, temporal or frontal, no sign of aphasia, agnosia, apraxia or dysarthria," Meredith confirmed, leaning forward as she looked at Bob.

"We found trace amounts of several unknown chemical compounds in the hair and skin cell samples," Merrin added, glancing back at Alex. "I can't identify them, but it's possible that the combination of the drugs and trauma might have caused a seizure. That, on its own, could have effectively wiped a conscious connection."

"We don't have a means of checking the deeper areas of the brain, Bob," Meredith said to the worried-looking doctor. "If the trauma affected the limbic system, we couldn't tell and it might explain what seems to be a complete wipe-out of memories."

Bob nodded, looking at Alex again. "What can you remember, in detail?"

"I remember waking up in a stone room," she said, eyes half-closing as she looked backward. "I was hungry and cold. I remember being chained with the other women and walking with them past the cells in the basement, getting blood drawn." She opened her eyes and looked at the floor. "I remember going into the caves and hiding. Not much after that until I woke up here, and nothing before it at all."

"No childhood memories? Nothing from before the virus took over?"

"What virus?" she asked, turning to Merrin questioningly.

"One of many things that have turned the world upside down and inside out in the last few years," Merrin said quietly.

"Is this permanent?" Alex asked, looking back to Bob.

"I don't know," he told her, shoulders lifting in a helpless shrug as he glanced at Meredith. "Memory is sometimes permanently destroyed by physical damage, but we can't find any sign of that, at least not with what we have available."

"So I could stay like this, or it could all come back, just like that?"

"Alex, there are some things we can try to help you," Meredith said. "Going back to places that have meaning to you, talking to people you knew well once, we can try hypnotherapy – don't give up on it just yet."

Alex's mouth quirked at one corner humourlessly. "I'm not giving up," she said. "I just don't know what else to do."

"The sense of familiarity you do get with some people, some places," Bob asked. "Do they seem related to anything else? An emotion?"

She thought about it for a moment, then shook her head. "No, I don't think so. There's no feeling that accompanies them, just a sense that perhaps I've seen or known whatever it is before. It's not any stronger than that."

"I'd like you come back to Tawas with me in a couple of days, Alex," Meredith said. "You have friends there, and from all accounts you were there longer than here? Things may come back more easily there."

"Okay," Alex said uncertainly as she looked from the tall, carrot-haired doctor to Bob. "Look, I appreciate all the help you're giving me, I truly do, but what we're talking about here is that there might not be anything that will help and at the moment, I'm stuck in a place where there's just nothing."

"You tell me that I used to handle the organisation for this place," she continued, turning to Merrin and gesturing vaguely toward the door. "But I have no idea of how to do that, and the other things … I don't see how I can put any of it back together now." Drawing in a deep breath, she looked down at the floor. "I'm living in a medical ward with two infants, and I have nothing more than whatever clothes you can scrounge up for me since no one can find who cleaned out the apartment where I used to live. I can't sit around waiting or hoping for my memories to miraculously come back. I need to do something to feel like this is my life again."

Bob glanced at Merrin uneasily. "Alex, I understand that this feels like you're waiting for something that might not happen, but you need to give it some time –"

"How much time?" she asked him sharply. "Weeks? Months? How much time are we talking about?"

"I can't give you an exact figure –"

"No," she said, nodding. "I know that. And I know why you want me to wait, but let's be honest here, it's been eight weeks and nothing's changed."

The man they'd all told her was the father of her children, who had loved her, had not come to see her or them once in that time. Whatever had gone on for him, it seemed clear to her that he wasn't going to try to overcome it. The one sight she'd had of him, walking fast from the room when she'd entered it, hadn't triggered so much as a flicker of memory. He'd watched her die twice, Merrin had said. Shot in front of him by the enemy he'd been fighting. She could understand that wasn't an easy thing to get past, and it wasn't as if she could help him with it, but she couldn't stay in this limbo of waiting either.

She looked at Meredith. "How do we get to Michigan?"

"One of the hunters will take us," Meredith said. "We can go the day after tomorrow, if you'd prefer?"

"The sooner the better," Alex agreed.

* * *

><p><em><strong>Ignacio, Colorado<strong>_

Mariana ducked her head as she came into the cavern, a pair of rabbits in one hand, her small bow and quiver of arrows in the other. She hesitated for a moment past the entrance, seeing the old man bending over the flat crystal as her eyes adjusted to the gloomy interior of the cave, then moved silently over the rough stone floor to the small fire.

Mattie, he'd told her to call him, and she did, from time to time. He was helpless here without her, unable to hunt or fish, or even find the right wood for the cooking fire, always getting the dried sticks that burned too quickly; spending his time either staring into the peculiar depths of the crystal or scratching over the coarse paper of his books or reading, the books angled to the firelight, his eyes screwed up and watering as he tried to make out the words. She couldn't help him with that, she'd been learning to read when the world had gone mad, but the words in his books weren't the same as the ones she'd seen at the little school down in the valley where the town had been.

Feeling his gaze, she looked over at him and held up one rabbit. "Got two," she said.

He nodded, mouth pursed as he stared at the dead animal. "We will eat it all tonight, Mariana, tomorrow we must go."

"Go where?" she asked him curiously, turning back to skin the rabbit. "Winter is coming."

"Yes, yes," he muttered as he got to his feet and looked around the cavern. "It is coming fast and hard and we must be there before the big storms begin." He stopped in the centre of the cavern and looked at her. "Kansas, Mariana. We need to get to Kansas."

"Why?"

"They need what I can tell them," he answered vaguely, picking up the capacious woven bag from the floor by his bed and beginning to fill it with the hand-stitched and bound books he'd laboured over.

"What can you tell them, Mattie?" the girl asked, her voice unconsciously patronising.

He snorted softly at the question and the tone, pushing down the irritation that seemed to be coming more quickly lately.

"I can tell them many things, little girl," he answered haughtily, turning his back to her as he kept packing the bag. "Things you have no idea about."

She heard the annoyance in his voice and kept silent. He was a helpless old man, most of the time, but sometimes there would be fire in his eyes and thunder in his voice and at those times, he frightened her. They would not be going anywhere if the storms came before they could get out of the mountains.

* * *

><p><em><strong>Lightning Oak Keep, Kansas<strong>_

Watching Bobby wrestling with the bulky cloth diaper under the baby on the table, Rufus hid his grin behind a glass of whiskey. On the other side of the table, Ellen had changed William and was holding him as she watched Bobby's face get redder, heard another muttered curse as the pin jabbed into his finger instead of through the cloth.

"It's a diaper, Singer, not a greased pig," she said acerbically as he dropped the safety pin for the third time. "Take your son and let me do it."

Bobby gave up on getting the three corners to meet and pin them one-handed with alacrity, taking William from Ellen and watching as she refolded the cloth and pinned the corners together quickly, refastening Elizabeth's clothing and picking her up. She glanced at Rufus, catching the grin.

"Laugh it up, Rufus, at least you had practice," she said tartly.

He nodded in agreement. "And thankfully I was a long way from Tawas when the love bug came through," he told her smugly.

She turned away and headed for the hall, Bobby trailing behind her as he shifted William from one arm to another.

How the mighty had fallen, Rufus thought with a soft chuckle. Not that Bobby gave two figs for what anyone else thought. He'd seen the old man's face soften whenever he held his children, his life-weathered mug almost unrecognisable without the slightly sour look.

Dom had had twins, two girls. He pushed the thought aside impatiently. He hadn't been there and someone else had and it didn't matter anyway, they'd had a lot of good times but there'd been nothing more to hold them any closer than that. The faint stab somewhere in the region of his chest countered the dry pragmatism of that thought but he ignored it. Done was done. Like everything else that had happened in the last year, it wasn't reversible.

He looked up when Bobby came into the room a few minutes later. "Doesn't look like you're getting the hang of it, Bobby."

The slightly-sour look reappeared. "Bite me, Turner."

"Just sayin'."

"Old dog, new tricks, blah blah," Bobby said as he poured himself a glass of whiskey. "I'll get there."

He sat down and stretched his legs out in front of the fire, sighing contentedly.

"That sounded peaceful," the hunter commented.

"Was," Bobby agreed readily, his eyes closing.

They listened to Ellen's footsteps come down the hall and Rufus turned to look at her as she came in.

"I thought Dean was coming with you tonight?"

"Last minute decision to stay at West Keep," Rufus said expressionlessly.

"That's a step in the right direction."

"I thought you two were quit of your meddling in his life," Bobby growled from the chair. "You never helped a situation yet, Ellen."

"I just want to see him happy, you know that," she told him, sitting on the sofa and looking at the fire. "If he can get around what's happened, he's got a chance."

"Wouldn't hold your breath for that," Rufus said sourly.

"Why?" Ellen stared at him narrowly.

Rufus frowned as he shook his head. "Nothing. Yet." He sighed and looked at her. "Alex might not wait as long as Dean needs."

"What?"

He told her briefly of what he'd seen in the morning, ignoring the huffs of impatience.

"No, well, we'll have to tell her she's going to have to –"

"What, Ellen?" Bobby cut her off, brows drawn together as he looked at her. "Tell her that he'll come around eventually? We don't know he will. Tell her that she has to give up whatever chance she has of finding someone else, since she can't remember what was between them and he won't go near her? C'mon," he growled. "We ain't doing anything about this. It'll sort itself out."

Rufus watched her face harden in the firelight as she looked at Bobby, then she let out her breath, shoulders slumping a little.

"He had what he wanted, Bobby," she said quietly.

"I know." Bobby looked at the fire. "An' it got screwed. But if that's gone, that's his decision, Ellen. Not yours, not ours." He looked at her, mouth twisting slightly. "You can't make him look for that again. And you can't make her wait for it."

Rufus watched the log on the hearth fall apart in a shower of sparks, the crackle the only noise in the room.

* * *

><p><em><strong>West Keep, Kansas<strong>_

Dean looked around the apartment distractedly, noting the thin coating of dust over everything, the protection symbols that hadn't helped at all, intact and inviolate on the floors and doors and windows.

He hadn't returned here because he'd thought she would move back in. But it appeared that she hadn't. He didn't know where her clothes or personal stuff had gone, but everything that remained, except for the books that filled the shelving on either side of the hearth, was his.

There was no way he could stay here, he thought impatiently, picking up the duffle and carrying it down the hall to the bedroom. He needed to get out of here, get on the road. Needed his goddamned car back was what he needed. They'd left it at Sioux Falls and he hadn't given it a thought until a week ago. He could go looking after they'd checked out Utah.

The bedroom was as dusty and unused as the rest of the apartment and he tossed the bags on the end of the bed and pulled open the closet door, grabbing handfuls of clothes and pitching them onto the bags without looking. The silence in the rooms and the sterile smell brought their own set of memories and he didn't want those in his head either.

_She's alive, just three floors down_. The thought snuck in and he slowed, fingers curling around the clothing tightly.

_Three floors. Alive, yes. But she didn't, now._

Didn't love him, didn't have the faintest idea of who the hell he was, he reminded himself again, pulling out the shirts and tossing them onto the bed with the rest.

_Your children are down there too._

That was a harder thought to fight. A son and a daughter and no father. Not dead, not missing. Just …

His stomach turned over. Fucked if he did, fucked if he didn't, he thought savagely.

_Well, boo hoo, I am so sorry your feelings are hurt, princess!_ Bobby's voice boomed caustically in his mind. _Are you under the impression that family's supposed to make you feel good? They're supposed to make you miserable! That's why they're family!_

That'd been Sam, he wanted to argue. It didn't make a lick of difference. And what if taking that chance could make a difference? What if it made her remember?

_What if it didn't?_

He dragged the rest of the clothing from the closet and shoved it into the bags, zipping them up and leaving the rest in the drawers.

_Not a fucking lick of difference_, he thought as he closed the apartment door behind him. Even if she never remembered and he had to live with that, he couldn't leave his kids fatherless.

Slowing down as he came around the last bend in the staircase, he wondered what the hell he was going to say to her, after the weeks of avoiding her, avoiding it all. The thought disappeared when he saw Alex walking down the hall in front of him, a tall, dark-haired man walking beside her and carrying a baby in his arms. Carrying one his kids? He stood in the shadow of the corner and watched them turn into the room, the door closing behind them.

It felt like an hour but it was only a few minutes when the door opened again. He recognised Drew as he stepped out into the hall, turned back to her.

"Anytime you need help, just say, okay?" the ex-cop said through the open doorway.

"Thank you," Dean heard her say, her voice just the same, a little low, warm with her feelings. "I'll do that, goodnight."

"'Night," Drew said, stepping back.

The door closed and Dean leaned back against the wall behind the corner, listening to the man's footsteps get closer. He stepped out just before Drew reached the corner.

"Dean," Drew said, stopping abruptly. He threw a glance over his shoulder at the doorway behind him and Dean felt a flush of anger ripple through him.

"What are you doing here?" he asked. They were the same height, similar builds, similar colouring even, Dean realised. Alex had a type. Their eye level was even.

Drew's mouth curled up on one side. "Guess you saw that. Just helping out, that's all."

"Helping out?" Dean repeated slowly. "Alex ask you for help?"

"Yeah, she did," Drew said. "You weren't around."

Dean stared at him silently and he exhaled, gesturing at the door.

"If you're stepping up, I'm glad," he added, looking at him steadily. "I wasn't trying to get in the way, I offered because she needed someone to help."

Dean looked away, his anger leaking out at the blunt statement. "Alright. But they don't need your help anymore."

"Fair enough."

Drew stepped past him and turned down the stairs, and Dean stood in the hall, listening to his footsteps receding.

She didn't, anymore. That was the bottom line, wasn't it? And if she wanted to be with someone else, wanted to raise his children with someone else, there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. He looked at the door and walked slowly toward it. What was he supposed to say?

Stopping when he reached the door, he stood there for five minutes, one hand half-lifted as he stared at the solid wood. Then he turned away and walked back to the stairs, picking up the bags and carrying them down to the office.


	2. Chapter 2 Up Against the Glass

**Chapter 2 Up Against the Glass**

* * *

><p><em><strong>US-40 Utah<strong>_

Sam braced a hand against the roof of the truck's cabin as it bounced over the lumps and cracks in the road, wondering if his spine would ever decompress. Beside him, Dean's gaze was fixed to the grey concrete strip illuminated by the heavy-duty headlights, and he seemed to move with the truck, no doubt helped by the light grip on the wheel. To Sam's right, Rufus was leaning back into the corner between the seat back and the passenger door, head bouncing against the window glass as he slept.

"So, you didn't see her?" Sam asked, his tongue narrowly missing being bitten as a large bump snapped his teeth together.

"No."

"You got right up to the door, but you didn't knock."

Dean flicked a sideways glance at him. "You need me to draw you a map, Sam? Yeah, I chickened out at the last minute. You satisfied?"

"No, uh, sorry," Sam back-pedalled, shaking his head. "I just – uh, just have trouble imagining that."

He saw the scowl tighten his brother's face and looked through the windshield. "Are you, um, okay?"

Dean exhaled loudly, deliberately loosening his grip on the wheel. He counted to ten. Then twenty. Then looked at his brother.

"You mean, you want to know about my feelings?"

On the other side of the truck, Rufus lurched into consciousness, roused by the tone in the older Winchester's voice as much as the words.

"Hell no, he doesn't want to know about your feelings," he grated, straightening up against the back of seat. "Where the hell are we?"

"On the 40 about twenty-five miles from whatever's left of Heber," Dean said shortly.

Sam looked at Rufus. "He can talk about his feelings if he needs to."

Rufus snorted. "Sam, trust me, can of worms you don't want to open, not now."

"I think I know my own brother well enough to –"

"Shut it, the both of you," Dean said. "Sam, how far along the 40 do we need to go before we turn off?"

"What's wrong?" Rufus asked, peering out into the darkness beyond the reach of the headlights.

"Not sure," Dean answered, changing up as the incline flattened out a little again. "Bad feeling."

"It's another two miles, we got a gravel road heading west. Vince said look out six miles past the reservoir which was four miles ago," Sam said, peering at the angled map in the dash lights.

A blast of wind rocked the truck and Dean glanced to the right, looking at the rising ground.

"Might get a bit rough over the next bit," he warned the two men beside him.

* * *

><p><em><strong>Canyon Road, Strawberry Peak, Utah<strong>_

Two miles after the turnoff the road began to switchback up and down the mountain and the wind hit them every time they shifted to a north-facing slope, the canvas canopy thundering behind them, and icy pellets of granular snow peppering the roof and windshield and doors.

The gravel road was a mass of washouts and corrugations, and Dean gentled them along the stretches that were mostly gone, clinging onto the steep slope as the snow got thicker.

"How much further to the base?" he asked his brother, raising his voice over the moaning wind and labouring engine as they crested another hill. The truck slid across the half-rock, half-sticky clay soil before he caught the edge and eased them back onto what he thought was the road.

"Half a mile," Sam said, looking through the thick snow that was lit up by the headlights, whiting out most of the landscape. "How can you see in this?"

Dean grinned humourlessly, the smile disappearing as he saw the shapes of buildings briefly between the flurries below them. "That's it."

The truck started to slide sideways again, and he changed down, the engine roaring as the tyres shifted across the slick surface and found a pothole that gave some grip as the weight of the truck fell into it. None of them had anything to say until the headlights showed the long, low building in front of them, stone walls and razor-wire glinting wetly in the lights as Dean pulled along in front of it.

"Looks welcoming," Rufus remarked as the engine died.

"Better than sitting in here for the night," Dean said, shrugging. He opened the door and an icy wind whistled into the cabin. Dropping to the wet ground, he pulled his coat collar up and walked down to the back of the truck, unzipping the back flap and feeling around for the gear bags.

Balthazar'd said that they'd searched the building and the sheds for any other prisoners and had found nothing. _Didn't mean that something couldn't've moved back in once all the noise and people had gone_, he thought, dragging out the big black bag that held his weapons and the slightly smaller green canvas duffel that carried sleeping bags, food, water and hopefully dry clothing. Slinging the green bag over his shoulder, he turned for the low porch and the elaborately carved dark wood front door.

Sam and Rufus followed him inside, Rufus heaving against the door and the wind behind it, forcing it closed and locking it. Inside, the noise of the storm was muted, and their flashlights picked out big rooms, still filled with furniture, dust coating everything.

"Where do you want to set up?" Rufus glanced across at Dean as they crossed the hall and entered a huge living area. In the hearth, the ashes swirled a little in the downdraught from the chimney, but logs were piled high on either side of the fireplace and a big box of smaller pieces stood on the raised brick hearth.

"Here'll do," Dean said, nodding as he looked at the fireplace and the overstuffed, capacious sofas that fronted it. "Get a fire going and we'll check out the rest of the rooms," he added, dropping the green duffel to the floor and taking a pump from the black bag.

Sam put his bags down and retrieved an automatic rifle, pushing several clips into the pockets of his jacket. He followed Dean out as Rufus laid a new fire and lit it.

* * *

><p>The rest of the house was more or less intact. Two of the bedrooms had broken windows, and were piled with debris from the outside, leaves and dirt and twigs mostly. They closed those doors. The bathrooms still had running water, cold and either gravity-fed from a higher tank or artesian from a spring below the house, Sam guessed. It was slightly hard with a high mineral content, but fresh and clean.<p>

Dean shone the flashlight around the kitchen, checking the cupboards. The food had spoiled, but he found a couple of hurricane lanterns, still filled with kerosene and carried them back to the living room. The basements, cellars and whatever else the house held could wait for morning. They'd locked every door that possessed the means and they could take watches, two on, one off, till dawn.

"Anything?" Rufus looked up as they came back in, the fire already adding a little warmth to the room.

"No," Dean said, lighting one lantern and setting it on a table behind the sofas. The light was a bright gold, gilding his skin and catching glints from the tips of his hair. The pressurised lantern hissed softly. "Doesn't look like anything's been in here at all."

"From what the Qaddiysh and Jane said, most of the space is under this level," Sam added, setting his gun on the sofa and picking up a canister of salt from the black bag, opening it and trailing a line along the thresholds and windowsills. Walking behind him, Dean shook a jar of thick red liquid, using a narrow brush to paint sigils and wards over the window glass and doors. Hell was closed, but he didn't want anyone else eavesdropping on what they were doing here.

"You two want to take first watch, I'll take last," he said, screwing the cap back on the wide-mouthed jar when he'd finished and returning it to the bag.

Rufus nodded and got up, picking up the shotgun and moving to the interior wall door. Sam picked up his gun and walked over to the windows, standing to one side of the almost-closed curtains and peering through the gap. He had a long, oblique view of the outside, without being visible.

Dean dragged out the sleeping bag and stretched out on the sofa in front of the fire, rolling onto one shoulder and closing his eyes. He wouldn't have even felt a drive like today's back in the old days, he thought tiredly. A few hundred miles over the smooth and maintained roads would've flown by, handled automatically. None of the roads were smooth anymore, of course. The weather hadn't helped. Not having the car hadn't helped either. He was bone-tired.

Under the crackle of the fire and the steady hiss of the lantern, he couldn't hear anything else. His thoughts vanished as sleep overtook them.

* * *

><p>Dean took point as they walked through the first level below the house, the flashlight lined up with the barrel. Behind him, Sam and Rufus each held one of the lanterns, throwing a much bigger pool of light around them. They'd gone through the room that had been covered in spell circles, the lines of them broken, the candles and torches that had lit them burned down to puddles of wax and ash on the floor. Beyond that had been a long, wide room with a line of cells down one side. The stone pillar, a pile of silver chains around its base and a shrunken, mummified skeleton resting on a platform behind it had given him the creeps. There might be a record of the binding spell the fallen had used in their attempts to hold the vamp, he supposed, somewhere deeper.<p>

He walked through the door at the end of the room and stopped a few feet beyond it. The flashlight illuminated the cave walls, glistening here and there with dripping moisture. As Sam and Rufus came in, the lanterns lit up the whole area. To the left, hewn stone steps descended and to the right a number of tunnels led out of the cave, deeper maybe into the mountain.

Dean looked at the tunnels, his face stony. The Grigori had bled the pregnant women every day to feed the vamp, he knew. When Usiku had left, he'd offered to take them with him and Jane had said some had gone along willingly, preferring the prospect of escape, even with a monster that might kill them or turn them, to the chance that they might be recaptured by the fallen. Those who'd chosen to stay hadn't been harmed by the vamp, Jane'd said. But they'd nearly starved to death, trying to stay hidden, trying not to get lost in the caves that riddled the stone depths. He turned away abruptly and walked to the stairs.

Within a few yards, the staircase became much narrower and steeper, the centre of the steps hollowed out and a trickle of water spilling down the centre making the footing trickier. Slowing down, he saw the flashlight's beam pick out a curving corner, and become swallowed in the vast darkness that lay beyond it.

"Yahtzee," Sam said softly as he stopped beside his brother on the flat, smoothed ground.

The lanterns couldn't light up the entire space, which stretched out in every direction from the entrance they'd come through. Close to them, the walls had been smoothed and shelving covered them, filled with books and manuscripts, objects both recognisable and out of their collective experience. Rufus walked out into the space, his lantern lifted high above his head as he looked around. A grouping of tables took up the other side, opposite the makeshift library, and behind the tables, workbenches lined the walls, covered in apparatus ranging from beakers and test tubes to oscilloscopes and microscopes and spectrometers.

"What the hell did they need a lab for?" Sam asked no one in particular, walking across the width of the cavern.

"That, maybe," Dean said, the flashlight beam playing over the huge cylindrical machine bolted to the rock floor and surrounded by more benches, these covered in computer monitors and boxes, tubing and wiring leading in and out of the polished metal sides.

"That's what the French found, in Switzerland, wasn't it?" Rufus followed Dean toward it, setting the lantern down on the end of the bench and picking up a file from a pile beside one of the computers.

"Looks like it," Sam agreed, lifting his lantern as he walked down the opposite side. He looked at the floor. "Not just mechanical. Look at the circle."

Dean swung the flashlight around, seeing the spell circle that enclosed the machine and its accessories, marked out along the edges with symbols and characters he didn't recognise.

"Can't read this," Rufus remarked, closing the file and picking up another. "It's Cyrillic."

Dean glanced back over his shoulder at him, one brow lifted. "Russian?"

Rufus nodded. "Some German here too, but a bit beyond my skills. We need to take this back with us, you know," he said, gesturing to the shelving and the lab. "All of it, or at least as much as'll fit on the truck."

"Yeah," Dean said, looking around. "I know."

"Dean, Rufus, look at this," Sam called from the other side of the machine.

The hunters walked around, looking at the low, rectangular box that sat under a chute from the side of the machine. Sam held the lantern over the contents and Dean frowned as he looked at the slimy, glistening piles of gelatinous flesh that was heaped in the bottom.

"Looks like a shifter's cast offs," he said, leaning closer and holding his breath against the stench of decomposition that rose from the container. He turned and looked at the chute speculatively. "Think it makes a new person from the old one like a shifter does?"

"Shifter doesn't alter the original but they get the memories and –" Rufus stopped abruptly, looking up at the machine as well.

Dean turned away from the chute, his flashlight beam playing over all the shelving that lined the walls, swinging around to look over the benches on the other side. "You see any tools here?"

"There were some boxes on the benches near the lab setup," Sam said, looking back over his shoulder.

"Get started on loading this documentation, and grab the camera from the gear bag on your way back down," Dean said abruptly, walking around his brother to the workbenches. "I wanna take a look inside this thing."

Sam's gaze flicked over the long counter of computer equipment. "Must have had power here, I'll see if I can find the generators, get them running. Give you more light and maybe we can see what they were doing on those."

Rufus looked from one to the other of the brother's backs, both heading in different directions. "That's okay, I'll just start loading all these damned books and files on my own then," he muttered to himself.

* * *

><p>A low throb came through the rock floor and the soles of his feet and Dean looked up as bank after bank of overhead lights flickered and strobed for several minutes, tubes warming up as the juice hit them.<p>

He turned off the flashlight and looked back down at the panel he'd removed as Sam came back into the room and walked to the computer bank.

"Automatic cut-off," he said, glancing at his brother. "Find anything?"

"Plenty," Dean said sourly. "Take a look."

Climbing up and over the bench, Sam peered down into the cavity revealed by the missing panel. The interior was much smaller than the dimensions suggested on the outside. Dean gestured impatiently at the sides, and Sam looked more closely, seeing a number of fine holes, a double line that ran along both sides of the smooth, ceramic interior.

"The needles?" he asked, turning and looking at his brother's frozen expression.

"Guess so," Dean said tersely, tossing the panel onto the floor, the harsh clanging of the metal hitting the rock making Sam flinch a little. "Fire those things up, see what you can find out about what exactly they were doing with this thing."

Sam clambered back down and walked along the countertop, hitting the power buttons for each machine, slowing to check that each powered up and moving to the next.

Had they figured out a way to replicate a shifter's process, he wondered uneasily? A mixture of technology and magic, or were the circles for some other reason, protection perhaps for the victim and clone. Theoretically, precise replication was feasible. On a practical level, it wasn't as easy as it seemed. Why had they bothered with Alex? Baeder had only seemed interested in inflicting the maximum amount of pain he could on Dean, in revenge for the attack on them, or insurance maybe against Dean trying to stop them. Neither reason suggested a reasonable motive for not only cloning her once, but twice. And the first clone must have been done in the time period when Ellen said Alex had been out of the truck. Ten hours, he remembered. The second clone could only have been made here.

He looked at the screens and sighed as he saw the login and password screen. He'd need some help with this.

"Talk to me," Dean said as he looked up at him.

"Secured system, I'll need Mitch and Deirdre to break into it."

"Fuck it," Dean said, looking at the interior panel and spinning the socket wrench in his hand indecisively. "Alright, forget it. Can you get those loaded first? We'll fit the rest around them."

Sam nodded. "I'll take samples of the chemicals they were using as well. Merrin told me they'd found trace amounts of unknown compounds in Alex's hair and skin samples."

"How's it look outside?" Dean asked. "Can we get through?"

"It wasn't a heavy fall; we should be able to make it if it stays clear."

"Can you get through to Kansas or are we too blocked?"

"I might be able to," Sam said, frowning. "From the top of the peak."

"See if you can get a weather forecast for us, I want get this stuff back to the order as fast as we can." He ducked back inside the tube, picking up a screwdriver with a fine-edged blade and levering off the internal panels.

* * *

><p><em><strong>Lourdes, France<strong>_

The castle had stood on the knoll above the river since the Roman invasion. It had been rebuilt several times over its long history and had served as strategic guardian to the valleys behind it, as a residence to the nobility, a prison and finally, it had been a museum and tourist attraction when the world had fallen apart.

"A lot of psychic pain in these stones," Elena said, looking at the foundations beneath her feet. "That will help with protection."

Peter nodded absently, looking out over the parapet of the keep's roof at the remains of the town that lay spread out below them. Most of the buildings had been destroyed, burned and looted and robbed of their walls and foundations to make other homes, likewise destroyed by monsters and weather and earth movements. The castle had remained and the curtain walls encircled a much larger area now, built up from the sides of the hill and doubled, the cavity between the inner and outer walls filled with salt and iron and silver and powdered crystals.

"This is as strong as we can make it," he agreed after a moment. "And big enough for the growing population."

It was in both their minds that the castle wasn't nearly as strong or well-hidden as the chapter safehold. It might become so, in time, if they could find the secrets of the order's building. The Americans had sent what they'd found and the heavy iron gates that barricaded the gate tunnel at both ends were based on those designs. The illusions had been more challenging to replicate, since the citizenry they were protecting were as susceptible to the fear spells as the bandits and monsters they were trying to discourage.

"Is Marc ready to go?" he asked her, turning back to her.

"In the morning," Elena said. "Adrian and Christophe will be going with him, they have had more experience than the others."

Peter frowned. "I thought he would be taking Luc as well?"

"Luc will not leave to hunt for awhile now," she said, smiling at him. "He is taking his responsibilities very seriously."

"Is he remaining at the order with Antoinette?"

"_Oui_, for the moment." She slipped her arm through his as they walked back to the roof door. "You have been buried too deeply in the Vatican documents, Peter."

He snorted. "Too deeply in the foundation stones of this place as well."

"With Francois, you and I, and the juvenile hunters, we will be able to keep this keep safe and begin to search for more people," she told him certainly. "For the first time, we have been able to grow enough to store food for the winter months, and we have enough room to keep it. We have the underground cable to the order, so communications will be possible no matter what else is going on."

It had been a busy summer, he thought, closing the thick door behind them and following her down the stairs. Since he'd returned, the hunters here had found many survivors, and with the help of the angels, had been able to finally provide a safe place for them. If the search for the tablet of the offspring of Nintu succeeded, he might even look forward to a world where humanity could begin again.

* * *

><p>Marc looked over the gear set out across the tables carefully. The arctic survival gear had come from the order, and was intact. The rest was a selection of weapons he thought would cover almost everything they might be likely to encounter on the two thousand mile trek north and east. The roads were questionable, and the weather would be the deciding factor on route and timing.<p>

Behind him, Adrian was studying the maps diligently. The twenty-four year old had been a soldier and been protecting a group of survivors in the ruins on the outskirts of Toulouse when they'd found them. He'd been adaptable enough to recognise that the creatures that had been hunting them were not figments of anyone's imagination, and had eventually discovered on his own that taking the head meant they did not get up again.

On the other side of the room, Christophe, the other hunter-in-training, was reloading magazines with silver and engraved hollow-point ammunition. He was twenty, and had led his family and the surviving few people of his town to a defensible ruined castle in Spain when the virus had killed all those around them. They'd lived off the land, moving around and ending up in Andalusia by the time Luc and Francois had found them. His sister was at the order, studying to become a legacy.

"This will take months," Adrian said, rolling the maps up and packing them away.

"Yes, most likely," Marc agreed, packing the gear tightly into the three black leather bags. "Christophe, ammunition goes in with the guns, we don't waste time searching separately."

The young man nodded, carrying the loads over and packing the outer pockets.

"If the only one who can read it is in America, why are we going along?" he asked Marc diffidently.

"Because we are brothers-in-arms, and they can't spare enough people to ensure it's found from their camps." Marc looked at him. "Get the latest forecast from Michel."

He nodded and got up, walking out of the wide, square and heading for the stairs that led up to the library.

"You don't think this will change much for us, in the populations we have seen rising?" Christophe asked the older hunter quietly.

Marc glanced at him. "It will stop new lines from forming, and from being so powerful," he said. "And eventually, without a creator, the creatures who have existed here for millennium will probably die out, weaker and weaker with each new generation. But not in our lifetimes."

Christophe looked down at the bag in front of him. "Then we will have our jobs and something useful to do, yes?"

Laughing, Marc nodded. "Yes, we will not be useless in this world."

* * *

><p><em><strong>I-70 E, Colorado<strong>_

_You weren't around._

The pointed words of the ex-cop rolled through his head again, and Dean acknowledged the bulls-eye, again. He hadn't been.

_What you're doing is gutless._

Whether Sam had meant it as a truth or as a goad, that was right as well. He'd taken the easy way out before, he'd probably do it again, if the circumstances arranged themselves right in the future. _Gutless_.

Rufus had told him that he'd seen Drew with Alex before, and while he was trying to believe what the man had said, it hadn't needed the old hunter spelling it out for him just what that would mean, if he kept doing what he was doing.

The thought, as intangible and fleeting as he could keep it, nevertheless filled him with an ice-cold dread.

Someone else with her. Someone else raising his kids. Someone else, maybe not even a hunter, maybe a civilian who wouldn't know how to protect them, how to teach them to protect themselves. Someone else she would look at and touch and comfort.

The chill became a shiver and his fingers tightened around the wheel, muscle leaping at the point of his jaw as his teeth clamped together.

His mind leap-frogged effortlessly down a path of worst-case scenarios and he felt a rill of sweat trickle down the back of his neck, shaking his head to get those images out.

Always wanting to go back, never forward. The self-knowledge beat at him. Going back had never been a possibility, not once in his life. Not with his father and brother, no matter that he'd almost begged Sam to stay with them, make it like it had been. Not with his choices and his deal, even when he'd seen what had happened to Sam because of it. Not with the men and women who'd come to be under his protection, under his widely-spreading blanket of responsibility. And not now, not with Alex, because she couldn't go back. Couldn't see back. Didn't know what they'd had or remember how it'd felt.

He'd played hardball with Death over her life, had risked his life against the entity's anger. Had tapped into something he hadn't even believed in, back then. Had let her into the places that he'd shown no one else. Was he going to make all that meaningless now? A waste because he couldn't face up to the future and all the risks that were undoubtedly hiding in it?

They had to be safe, that was the main thing, he thought, forcing down the rest. Had to be safe and know that he wanted to be there. He'd deal with everything else, same as he'd been doing his whole life. So long as they were safe and they knew him.

* * *

><p><em><strong>Litteris Hominae, Kansas<strong>_

The truck shuddered to a halt and Sam got out, going to the oak and unlocking the door as the illusions that surrounded them dissolved in the crisp, morning sunshine.

Dean turned and backed the truck up to the edge of the concrete steps leading down the entrance, getting the rear as close as possible. He nodded at Sam's thumbs-up in the side-mirror and turned off the engine, leaving it in gear as he opened his door and walked around to the back.

From the safehold's interior, Oliver and Jasper peered out curiously, brows rising as the hunter yanked out the first box of files and books and carried them down the steps toward them.

"Grab a box," Dean grunted as he walked past them and down the iron stairs to the situation room.

Mitch and Chuck and Deirdre joined the line, unloading the computers along the empty tables in the library, stacking the books and files and boxes of artefacts against the walls and shelves.

"They left everything?" Jerome asked Dean as he dumped another box of books near the scholar.

"Figured they'd be going back, I guess," Dean agreed, turning back to the stairs. "You got anyone here who speaks or reads Russian and German?"

Jerome nodded. Both he and Felix did, and probably Katherine as well. Jasper certainly spoke Russian. Anything tricky could go to the French.

* * *

><p>It took almost two hours to unload the entire contents and the rooms looked distinctly crowded when they'd finished. Mitch and Deirdre had plugged in the computers and powered them up, both retrieving software to bypass the security systems of the Grigori and access the files on the hard drives.<p>

Dean rubbed a hand over his face as he followed Chuck back to the office. He wanted to get to the keep, but not until he got some information about the machine that had been in the Utah base.

"Any more visions?" he asked the prophet as Chuck dropped into the chair behind the desk.

Chuck shook his head. "No, we've just been going through the tablet and collating all the information on it," he said, gesturing to the oily-looking engraved stone that sat next to the laptop.

"That's good, I guess," Dean said, leaning on the edge of the desk and looking around at the room that was packed with books and computers, every available surface piled with reams of paper, typed and handwritten, from the translations so far. "You getting an idea of the big picture of that thing yet?"

"It's definitely a power sink," Chuck said, leaning back in the chair. "Aside from the information it provides, I mean. There's a way to get to that power, somehow, but I don't think it's for the prophet."

Dean frowned as he looked over his shoulder at him. "You're the only one who can read it."

"Yeah, but the impression I'm getting is that it's not exactly with what's written there, that's actually more of a diversion than anything else."

"What else is there to access?"

"I don't know," Chuck said with a tired shrug. "I might get a better idea of it when we get another one of the tablets."

Snorting softly, Dean shook his head. "Don't hold your breath for that, it'll be months."

"Well, not like I'm sitting around doin' nuthin' in the meantime," Chuck said, gesturing vaguely around the room. "That stuff you brought, the computers and the files – is that what they used on Alex?"

Dean stiffened slightly against the edge of the desk. "Yeah, looks like."

"Do you think she'll get her memories back if you can figure out what they did?"

"I don't know." Dean straightened up and turned for the door. "Keep us posted on your progress with the rock, Chuck."

"Yeah, I will."

He watched Dean walk out, wondering uneasily at the tension that seemed to get stronger and stronger in the man. He'd been overjoyed to hear that Alex had not been killed. They'd been friends for a long time, first at Chitaqua then here, but seeing her now, no recognition of him at all in her face and all the history they'd had gone, he couldn't imagine how Dean was dealing with that.

He looked down at the table, thumb sliding the catch on the lid of the laptop automatically and stopped, a frown drawing his brows together.

The tablet had been lying on the blotter next to the computer when he'd sat down. He'd seen it there, had looked at it when Dean had asked about the power it held. Now, it was on the other side of the desk's top, near the edge.

He might've pushed it, when Dean had left, he thought uncertainly. A little anyway. But all the way to where the man had been leaning against that side?

Reaching over, he felt the stone's tingling warmth in his fingers as he picked it up and moved it back to the blotter, looking distractedly at the screen as the laptop loaded.

* * *

><p><em><strong>West Keep, Kansas<strong>_

"It'll take them a few days to go through that stuff, you know," Rufus said as he walked beside Dean from the keep's hall to the medical offices.

"Yeah, I know," Dean muttered. He had a box of the chemical samples and the first rough translations of the files that had seemed to be related to them in his arms and he could hear the slight wheeze at the end of Rufus' indrawn breaths as the older man exerted himself to keep up.

"Doesn't really further our jobs either," Rufus pointed out unwillingly, stopping beside the younger man and opening the door to Merrin and Bob's warren of offices and examination rooms and surgery.

"If we know what they're doing and find out why, we'll know more about the rest," Dean countered, walking past him and looking around. "There're still the ones on the other side of the world the angels are worried about."

Merrin came out of one of the doors, brows shooting up as she looked at the two men.

"What's wrong?"

"Found the Utah base," Dean said shortly, setting the box down on the examination table. "They had a machine, we think they used it to clone Alex."

He tapped the lid of the box. "The order's looking through the files now, but these were the chemicals they probably used."

Looking down at the box, Merrin called over her shoulder, "Bob! Got some something here."

She looked back at Dean. "Do you know what it did? How it worked?"

He shook his head, looking away. "All in German or Russian, they're working on the translations."

"That's good, this will help, I'm sure of it," Merrin said, her voice gentle.

"Yeah."

Rufus followed him as he turned and walked back out. "When do you want to head south, look for the boss vamp?"

Dean slowed, looking up the hall toward the stairs. "Uh, that's gonna – uh, depend …"

Rufus looked at him closely. "You alright?"

"Yeah, got something I need to do," Dean said, flicking a glance at the hunter and back to the stairs. "I'll catch you later."

He walked away, heading for the stairs and Rufus watched him, his confusion dissolving as he realised where Dean was heading.

"'Bout time," he muttered, turning away and walking back down the hall toward the main stairs and the offices.

* * *

><p>Palms sweating, and his pulse booming erratically against his ears, Dean stared at the open door blankly, taking in the empty room beyond it, the bed stripped and the curtains draw back and the surfaces clean and devoid of anything at all.<p>

He turned at the squeak of soft-soled shoes coming along the hall toward him, seeing one of Merrin's nurses-in-training coming out of one of the other wards.

"Hey," he forced the word out through the dryness of his throat. "What happened to Alex?"

She stopped and glanced into the empty room, shrugging slightly as she looked back at him. "She left early this morning, Dr Forsythe took her back to Michigan."

"What?" Dean stared at her. "Why?"

"You'd probably have to ask Dr Malley about it," she said, shaking her head. "I thought it was something to do with getting her memories back, but I'm not sure about that."

"Do you know when she'll be back?" he asked, wondering why no one had thought to tell him about it.

"No. Sorry," the young woman said, walking past him and continuing down the hall.

"Thanks," he muttered to her retreating footsteps, rubbing both hands over his face in frustration.

No one had told him because they'd thought he didn't want to know. Wouldn't care where she was or what she was doing, he realised.

The low-grade hum of anxiety that had filled him since crossing the state line back into Kansas notched a little higher and he shook his head. She was gone and maybe back at the camps she would remember something. He turned away from the door and started to walk slowly down the hall. He had one other thing he could get on with, he thought. Needed to get on with. He could take Lee and Elias, neither were tapped for training right now and it would be a quick trip, they could check out the towns along the way for anything useful at the same time.

* * *

><p><em><strong>Porcupine River, Yukon<strong>_

Ujarak climbed through the deadfall that littered the steep sloping side of the cliffs lining the river, stopping as he reached the crest and crouching below the low spreading branches of one of the black spruces that bristled over the hill. Below him, the yellowish-grey soft soils of the steep incline led down to the river, it's current visible along the edges as it flowed around or over the gravel banks.

For weeks, the summer temperatures had persisted, right up to the coast and the caribou had lingered in the unseasonal warmth, continuing to build up their reserves of necessary fat for the fast-approaching winter months. For weeks, the days had been hotter than he recalled in his relatively few summers, and even the elders had commented that they'd never seen such a run of long, warm days. The insects had plagued every living thing, driving the animals to the gravel plains and banks and into the forests and the villagers to keeping smoky fires going constantly around their homes.

Two days ago that had changed, fall finally coming to the north with a storm that lashed the land with sleet and hail and rain. And, more surprisingly, the caribou had gone, together and in a single night.

Ujarak had followed the trail, a mile wide and as obvious as if heavy vehicles had crashed through the bush and over the broken ground. He'd seen the wolf packs pacing him through the nights, heard their music lifting over the hills as each pack called to the next, the urgency in the high notes as plain as a shout to him. Food! Food!

And here at the bend in the river, already swollen with snow and rain from further up the mountains, he saw the host break through the thin forest of aspen and poplar, and bound down the short banks into the water. A sea of heaving brown backs and massive antlers, branched and curving, the animals not swimming in orderly small groups as they usually did but in a seething crowd, bellowing and crying, the calves pressed between the adults, in danger of being crushed and trampled as they came into the shallower water. Along the higher ground on both sides of the turgid, flowing river, the outlines of the wolves were barely visible in between the thin trunks of the trees.

What would possess them to run like this, he wondered in astonishment? As if the devils of hell were chasing them?

The leaders reached the high, steep cliffs of the opposing bank, hindlegs thrusting at the slope, heads lowered, already knowing that they would have to fight their way through the predators, he thought, watching them.

A gust of wind blew down between the ramparts, touching the skin of his face with a breath of ice and he pulled the furred hood of his coat further forward. No predator or even large pack of predators would have created this mass panic in herds of this size, he realised. To the north, the sky was darkening, cloud boiling along the edges of the horizon and he got to his feet, his rifle cocked and ready as he walked back down the slope to the valley.

* * *

><p><em><strong>West Keep, Kansas<strong>_

Ben walked along the tunnel between the northern bailey and the eastern one, head bowed in thought. Dean had taken off again, this time without even making an effort to say goodbye or where he was going and he wondered if he'd even remembered that he'd promised to take him along, the next non-lethal trip. He didn't think so.

Nothing was working out the way he'd thought it would, when the army had arrived back, exhausted and victorious and with hundreds of new people, survivors of the demon army and the battle on the plains. Sean and Vince had told him about most of it, and he'd gotten some of what had happened in the foothills of the mountains from Rufus, the bit about Dean going after the running Grigori and taking them down. Rufus hadn't given him much detail on what else had happened there, but he'd heard about that from the soldiers, third or fourth hand.

When the word had spread that one of the angels had brought Alex back, he'd thought things would go back to how they'd been. Had thought Dean would go back to how he'd been, before the first attack. But if anything, the hunter had become more withdrawn, going out with Elias, with Rufus and Sam, with Kelly or Vince, forgetting his promise, run after run.

Alex was different, he knew. Frighteningly different. She didn't remember anything or anyone, not even Dean, not even him. She'd smiled at him when he gone to see her, but he could see that she didn't know who he was, didn't know what he'd been talking about when he tried to remind her of things back in Tawas, or the nativity scene last Christmas or even Father Michael. He'd seen she didn't remember Dean either, or Rufus or Ellen or Bobby. The same strained look had been on her face as they'd all crowded around her.

"Hey, watch where you're going!"

The strident tone snapped him out of his thoughts and he stopped dead, looking up into the rounded face of the girl standing in front of him.

"Sorry," he offered, taking in the unmollified dark brown eyes, heavily fringed by long dark lashes, and the no-nonsense pulled-back dark brown ponytail. His age, he thought, and nearly as tall.

"You Ben Braedon?" she asked him abruptly and his eyes widened in surprise.

"Yeah. Where you looking for me?"

"Not by choice," she told him bluntly. "Rufus said I need to start training with your group."

Ben looked at her, his expression doubtful. "We're, um, kind of the top level for our age group …" he started to say, the words trailing away as he watched her eyes narrow suspiciously at him. "That's, uh –"

"I'm Krissy Chambers," she cut him off. "I'm already a hunter, so presumably that's why I'm supposed to be training with you."

"Oh." He couldn't think of anything to say to that. He'd met a Lee Chambers, a week ago when there'd been a meeting over in the main keep offices. "You're dad's name Lee?"

"That's right." She looked impatiently at her watch. "Aren't you supposed to be training now?"

"Yeah," Ben said, gesturing vaguely toward the end of the tunnel. "This way."

He started forward and stepped away a little as she turned on her heel and fell into step with him. "Were you at the battle in Colorado?"

"Possessed," she said, the single word proclaiming that was all she was going to say about it.

"You must be pretty good to have survived," Ben said, his admiration leaking out without thought. For a moment she didn't say anything and he wondered if that'd been the wrong thing to say.

"I didn't have much to do with that," she allowed finally, keeping her gaze on the brightening end of the tunnel ahead of them.

"How'd it get you?"

She sighed deeply, then shook her head. "My dad and me, we had protective charms, but they were on chains." Pushing back her sleeves, she tilted her arm toward him, the black tattoo easily visibly against the smooth, white skin under the inside of her elbow. "Now we have permanent protection that no one can just pull off."

Ben nodded. It wasn't necessary anymore, now that the gates had been closed, but all the hunters, from fourteen years and up had the same tattoo, inked into their skin.

"Is this going to be like a kiddie class?" Krissy turned and asked him, her eyes rolling a little.

Ben looked back at her, trying to determine how much of the attitude the girl was throwing out was a put-on and how much was real.

"Not a kiddie class," he said, thinking of Kelly's punishing flips onto the hardwood floors of the training room. "Wait and see."

* * *

><p><em><strong>Camp Tawas, Michigan<strong>_

Leaning over the cot, Alex tucked the soft, light, down-filled quilt around the babies lying in it, smiling as James' small brows drew together briefly in a fleeting frown, his mouth opening and closing without a sound. She was learning their expressions now, seeing the differences in the two children instead of the similarities. Evelyn was the louder but not nearly as determined as her brother, who would persist in going after whatever it was he wanted until he got it. Neither child was fractious, she'd been a little surprised to realise, they seemed to her to be more aware of their surroundings, of the people who came and went in their small world than the other babies she'd seen, but she admitted readily to herself, that could have had something to do with her personal bias in the matter.

Straightening, she walked to the window on the other side of the bed. Beneath the walls that surrounded the camp, the slope dropped sharply to the lake. At the moment it was still, reflecting the forests on the opposite shore, tinted with the colours of the sunset. Did she remember this, she wondered? There'd been small moments, knowing which way to turn when she'd climbed the stairs, an involuntary flinch at the sound of a car coming up the gravelled drive from the gates, nothing that she could call discrete or very positive at all.

Renee, the tall, slender blonde wife of the camp's leader, hadn't returned any memories at all. She'd said they'd been friends, good friends, for the years since the virus and had told her of coming to the camp, not this one, but another one that had been destroyed since, coming in with Dean Winchester and Rufus Turner, and others, and moving in with her there. It'd been an interesting story, but she'd had no resonating moments within it, no tugs of familiarity. Even the photos Renee had produced, rare moments that someone had thought to capture on film and keep, hadn't stirred her memories or emotions, although they had piqued her curiosity. In one, Dean had been standing with a group of others, his arm casually slung around the shoulders of a dark-haired woman, both smiling into the camera, a young boy standing in front of them. She hadn't asked about the woman or the boy, or their relationship to the man.

There had been one that had caught her, almost on the edge of the frame, as if she'd been trying to get out of the picture. Her hair had been shorter, a tangled mess of maple-coloured curls and she'd looked slightly uneasy, standing between a tall man with a wide grin and wheaten blond hair, and Rufus, both crowded close to her. Friends, perhaps, from when she'd lived there. She'd seen the disappointment in Turner's eyes when he'd realised she didn't remember him at all.

Stepping back from the window and sitting on the edge of the comfortable bed, she wondered how long she would have to stay here, at Meredith's whim of trying to get her memories back. Not that it mattered all that much, she had no real life in Kansas and no real life here either. A perpetual visitor, she thought a little acerbically, with no place to go.

There was a soft tap at the door and it opened, Renee's head appearing around the edge. "Are you ready to try the hypnosis, Alex?"

_Sure_, she thought, getting up. _Why not?_

"Alice and Andrea will stay here and watch the babies," Renee added, pushing the door wider as a self-possessed nine-year old and eleven-year old walked in. Alex smiled automatically at the girls, who'd brought colouring books and several bags of toys with them. "You two be very quiet and Alice, come straight away if they wake up, alright? We'll be in the office."

"Yes, Mama," Alice said confidently, pushing long blonde curls back over her shoulders. "Don't worry."

Renee's mouth quirked into small, one-sided smile as she closed the door behind Alex, gesturing to the right and the staircase at the end of the hall.

"Are they both yours?" Alex asked, falling into step with the taller woman.

"No, just Alice," Renee said. "She was five when the virus hit our town. She has a younger brother, Cory, he'll be seven in December, and of course the twins."

"And the births here, and in Kansas, nearly all multiple, that was a – a goddess, that was released?"

Hearing the uncertainty in her tone, Renee smiled and shrugged. "Yeah, apparently two were let out at the same time. One of them just increased the populations of people and animals and plants. The other one," she hesitated a moment, then continued, "the other one increased a different set of populations."

Alex looked at her. "The monsters."

"Yeah." Renee stopped at the top of the stairs. "I know this all seems, well insane, for lack of a better word, and you're probably feeling like you fell into the rabbit hole, but it all happened. You were right in the middle of it for a long time."

"What do you mean?" Alex followed her slowly down the stairs. A frisson of unease sent a flush of heat through her at the words, as if they'd meant much more than Renee had intended.

"When Lucifer was on this plane, and demons were everywhere, you were the only one who could see him, the only one who could communicate with Dean's brother, Sam."

Alex frowned. She'd met Sam, in the keep. He'd been kind to her, trying to help her to remember. He'd tried to explain his brother's absence as well. She couldn't think how communicating with Sam had anything to do with a fallen angel and demons.

Renee saw the frown and shook her head. "It's a very long story," she said quickly, forestalling the questions she could see in the woman's face. "I'm not sure I can even tell it well enough to make a lot of sense to you."

There wasn't much that was making sense, Alex acknowledged silently. A pandemic that had decimated the world's population, not that she remembered the world prior to the pandemic any more than she did this one. Angels and demons and vampires and ghouls and werewolves and a battle with the devil in the city of Atlanta. It did sound insane. She wondered if that was a part of the reason Dean Winchester had kept his distance from her.

"Come on, Meredith and Ray are waiting for us."

* * *

><p>Alex lay on the long sofa, her eyes closed, listening to the soft burr of the doctor's voice. She didn't feel as if anything was happening.<p>

"Can you hear me?" Meredith asked quietly.

"Yes," she said, opening her eyes and looking at her. "I don't think this is going to work."

Both of the doctors sighed in unison, glancing at each other. "Alex, would you consent to being assisted to a hypnotic state by the use a short-term drug?"

She looked at Ray uneasily. "What kind of drug?"

"We can give you a few milligrams of a drug known as sodium thiopental," Meredith said calmly. "It's used to assist in the assimilation of anaesthetics among other uses, and will simply put you into a state of near-unconsciousness, so that the hypnotic state can be induced."

"Will it affect my milk?" Alex looked at her carefully.

"No, not at all," Meredith said. "It's often used prior to an epidural in labour. Most of it will be expired through your lungs over the five minutes following the injection, the rest before you get back upstairs."

"Alex, it's not dangerous to you or your children," Ray added. "It just gives us a chance to get past the strong mental walls you have in place."

"They might be there for a good reason," she countered, looking from him to Meredith. "I know you're trying to help, but I'm wondering if this is a good idea."

Meredith's mouth compressed a little as she looked back at her. "You said it yourself, Alex," she said tightly. "At the moment, you have nothing, no past, no life. You might be able to keep going this way, just starting from scratch, but your mind might also throw everything that happened back at you, somewhere down the line." She paused, lifting her hands in a careless gesture. "Do you think that will be any easier to handle? If it all comes back after you've chosen a new life?"

_Good points_, Alex thought sourly, closing her eyes again. _Damned if you do, damned if you don't_.

"Alright."

Meredith looked at Ray and nodded and the doctor left the room to get the IV set up.

"Meredith?"

The doctor looked at her. "Yes?"

"If this doesn't work, or if it doesn't do what you expect it to," Alex said slowly. "Does that make it more likely that it won't come back at all?"

She heard the gusting exhale of the woman beside her.

"I don't know," Meredith admitted reluctantly. "I guess it increases the odds."

Ray returned and slid the needle into the vein on the inside of Alex's elbow, attaching the cannula and the tube from the small bag. "This'll take less than a minute."

Consciousness vanished and then returned, Alex hearing Meredith's voice close beside her ear. She couldn't open her eyes.

"Alex, can you hear me?"

"I hear you."

"Good. You are relaxed and comfortable and I'm going to ask you some questions," Meredith said slowly and clearly. "They won't make you uncomfortable, they are just questions and you can answer them without any feelings about them at all."

"Alright."

"Do you know what day and month it is?"

"October thirteenth," Alex said without hesitation.

"Do you know your name? Where you were born?"

"Alexandra Charlotte Tennyson," Alex said. "I was born in Grand Rapids."

"That's very good. Do you remember your childhood?"

"My mother died, when I was a baby," she said, a slight frown marring her forehead. "My father and I looked after each other until I was sixteen. Then he died. Of cancer."

"Good. What happened after that?"

"I don't know." The frown deepened slightly. "There's nothing there."

"Do you remember buying Camp Chitaqua, Alex?"

A flash of dilapidated buildings filled her mind and she flinched back from the image involuntarily. _The lake was bright and sparkling beyond the weathered cabins. She was kneeling in front of a large machine, pieces around her, trying to get a bolt through a hole that didn't line up quite correctly_.

"I think so," she answered uncertainly. "There was a big house and a lot of cabins. I was going to … going to …"

_The house was clean. She lifted the broom to catch the cobwebs that were thick under the small overhang of the cabin roof. A crack of thunder rolled over the lake and she turned away, pulling her coat tightly around her as she ran through the sudden downpour back to the house_.

"It was going to be a camp for kids who couldn't get out of the cities," she said.

"Do you remember when the cars arrived, with Dean and Renee and Lisa?"

_A tall man, dark-haired and grimy, holding a bottle toward her, his mouth lifted in a one-sided smile_.

"He wanted me to drink the water."

Meredith looked over at Renee, who nodded vehemently. Pulling out a small notepad, she started to write, questions, events that she knew Alex should remember.

"Yes, what else do you remember then?"

"Nothing," Alex said, looking around at the blackness. It was just him, standing there, holding out the bottle, smiling challengingly at her. "Just the water."

"Two years have passed since then, Alex," Meredith said, shaking her head at the notepad held out to her. "You were dreaming about Sam Winchester, in Atlanta."

"No."

Meredith's brows shot up. "What do you mean?"

"I dreamed of Dean first, not Sam," Alex corrected her. "Sam was killing him."

"Do you remember when the army left Chitaqua to go to Atlanta?"

"No."

"Do you remember moving from the camps at Michigan to the stone and concrete keep in Kansas?"

"No."

That wasn't entirely true, she thought in confusion. She remembered a room, crowded with mismatched furniture, her books filling the shelves, the smell of venison stew from the kitchen and the front door opening. But that was all.

"I want you to remember March, this year, now, Alex," Meredith said. "March fifteen. Can you remember that day?"

"Yes," Alex said, without surprise. It'd been the day that the demon army had come to Lebanon. She remembered Rudy lying on the cot in the stone hall, his shoulder and chest soaked in blood.

"Do you remember what happened that day?"

"The demon army attacked the keeps."

"And what happened next?" Meredith said, her gaze flicking to Ray.

"There was a little boy in the keep," Alex said. "He said his sister was hurt. He touched us and we were outside, in the night."

"What happened then?"

"They chained us together," Alex said. "Ellen and Kim and I. We were in a truck."

"What happened after that, Alex? Do you remember?"

"No."

"What do you see when you try to remember?" Meredith tried again.

"There's a bright light, and white walls. Very close to me," Alex said, turning her head. "That's all. That's all I can see."

Ray gestured to her and Meredith saw Alex's pulse, hammering fast at the base of her throat.

"Alright, we're going to look back again, Alex, back to the second year at Camp Chitaqua. Do you remember Father Michael?"

The memory was little more than a flash in her mind, holding an old man, wiping the blood from the corner of his mouth, seeing seeds turn into seedlings, push up through the damp soil and grow in front of her eyes.

"I don't think so."

"Do you remember anything else?"

Another flash, this one brighter, more vivid. She was in a building, backing away from Dean. He was holding a gun and it was pointed at her. He followed her into an old-fashioned office, the walls covered in maps and shelving, filled with books. He told her to lie on the sofa in front of the fireplace and go to sleep, sitting down in the leather-upholstered chair across from her, the gun's round black end aimed at her. Behind the gun's barrel, his face was hard and expressionless, his eyes cold and dark as he stared at her.

"Dean had a gun pointed at me," she said slowly. "He told me to go to sleep."

"What else, Alex, what else do you remember?"

"Nothing. The rest is dark." She turned her head restlessly from side to side. "It's all just dark."

* * *

><p><em><strong>Sioux Falls, South Dakota<strong>_

The truck's engine died and the silence filled the cab completely. Elias looked from the unremarkable dead-end in front of him to the thunderstruck expression on the face of the man beside him.

"Is this it?"

Dean couldn't respond. The road, the hill, the valleys – the car – _the goddamned CAR!_ – were all gone.

"Dean?"

"What!?" He wrenched open the door of the truck and got out, walking to the crumbling edge of the shallow depression that marked where all those things had been the last time he'd been here. "Where's my fucking car!?"


	3. Chapter 3 Rhymes and Riddles

**Chapter 3 Rhymes and Riddles**

* * *

><p><em><strong>Sioux Falls, South Dakota<strong>_

In the truck, Elias paused with his hand on the door handle, exchanging a glance with Lee who sat beside him. "That doesn't sound good."

Lee's mouth twisted up to one side. "Nope, doesn't sound good at all."

"Better see if we can do anything about the incipient breakdown," the auburn-haired hunter grunted, pushing the door open and sliding out. He walked to the edge of the depression and stood beside Dean, looking over the featureless bowl.

"It was definitely here when you left?" he asked.

Dean turned to look at him, his lips thinned out and eyes almost black with the effort of holding back his spiralling frustration, disbelief and rage.

"It was here," he said through clenched teeth. "We were down there – there used to be a down there and that's where the gate was – used to be."

"Uh huh."

Lee stopped on the other side of Dean, looking over the shallow indentation. "Think it's still there, under the ground?"

"Need some machinery to dig it out, if it is," Elias agreed non-commitally.

"You think there's anything left in Sioux Falls? Handle a job like this?" Lee asked.

"Might be."

"Goddamn it, quit the comedy act," Dean said, swinging around and heading back to truck. As he reached it and swung into the cab, he called over his shoulder, "There was an earthworks company, down at the other end of town."

Bobby'd had a small backhoe in the yard, he remembered, but not under cover. _Probably nothing left but the frame by now_. He drummed his fingers impatiently against the wheel, waiting for the men to get in.

* * *

><p>The backhoe dropped another load of earth into the back of the truck and Lee drove the loaded truck out of the crater they'd dug, dumping the soil on the other side of the incline down by the end of the road. There was quite a heap of it there now, he thought, turning around and heading back.<p>

On the other side, Elias was pushing more soil out with a bulldozer, revealing rock and whole trees as the blade scraped and shoved the piles higher. Dean was working the hoe where the 'dozer had been, gingerly lowering the bucket and scraping the soil back, looking for the gleam of black-painted metal with ever-increasing levels of anxiety and frustration.

Three days, they'd been at it now, Lee realised as he backed the truck down the slope toward the digger. Moved a lot of soil, hadn't found anything of note yet.

He stopped and shifted into neutral, waiting for the heavy thump of another load to go into the back, easily discernible from the bounce of the suspension. When nothing happened, he looked in the side-mirrors, brows lifting slightly as he saw Dean walking across the ground and dropping to his knees, hands digging at something out of view.

Making sure that the truck couldn't go anywhere, he got out and went to look, seeing a widening flat sheet of metal cleared under the man's hands, dull and a little rust-covered as the soil was removed.

"That it?"

Dean didn't respond and Lee looked at Elias who nodded to him, and turned back to the waiting 'dozer. The machines were too big to handle the next delicate stage, and Lee walked back to the truck, moving it back up the slope to flat ground and pulling out the shovels from the lockbox behind the cab. Behind him, he heard Elias moving the 'dozer out of the hole as well, tracks clanking as he eased it around the edge, its fifty ton weight crushing and levelling the berm.

"Need a crane," Elias said, wiping his arm over his face tiredly when he'd lifted the last shovelful of soil from around the bent and flattened front tyre and threw it aside.

Lee bit back a comment about throwing good effort after bad, staring down at the crushed and partially flattened vehicle in the hole they'd dug around it. Elias hadn't acted as if there was any problem spending hours digging it free, and he guessed that the car meant a lot more than just transport to the unofficial leader of the hunters of Kansas.

Dean shook his head. "Get the tow cable from the truck, rear wheels are still straight, we can pull her out with that angle," he said, looking up at the steep slope above him. "There was a four-ton bolt-on truck crane down at that place," he added after a moment's thought. "Get that and we'll use it to lift the front end up for the tow back."

Lee nodded and turned around, walking back up the hill. He wasn't so sure that the rear wheels were as straight as Winchester said they were but they'd gotten this far with the auto rescue, it wouldn't kill them to go all the way.

* * *

><p>An hour later, Dean stood at the top of the hill, the truck and car parked on a flat section of gravel road, walking around the black car and reviewing the problems.<p>

The rear wheels were straight and the tyres were, somewhat miraculously, intact. The front, hoisted up by the heavy-duty crane on the back of the truck was a flattened and squashed mess, the engine block driven down through the mounts by the weight of the earth that had fallen in on it. A few weeks, he thought optimistically, if he could get around to get the parts and panels. He refused to entertain any doubt about being able to do that.

He'd rebuilt her before, he could do it again. It would help, as a matter of fact. Take his mind off the things he couldn't do anything about. He checked the shackles holding the steel cable between the crane and the chassis and nodded to what he could see of Lee's face in the truck mirror, glancing at Elias as Lee moved the truck and car down the road a little.

"She's fixable."

Elias shrugged lightly. "Everything's fixable, if you're prepared to take the time and effort to do the job right."

Dean stopped, looking after the man as he walked around the car to the other side of the truck.

* * *

><p><em><strong>November 2, 2013. Camp Tawas, Michigan<strong>_

"That's Lake Solitude," Renee said, pointing at the lake-shore as she negotiated the overgrown gravelled drive. "The other lake is Huron."

Alex looked around, holding on as the car bounced over the ruts and holes. Renee stopped when they came to an overgrown part of the woods, and Alex belatedly saw the blackened timbers protruding out through the undergrowth and between the saplings.

She got out of the car, and stared at what remained of the big house. The stone chimney had been smashed half-way up, big fieldstones scattered around it.

_The porch had been covered in fairy-lights, twinkling golden against the black night and the warm golden logs._

She blinked at the fragment of memory and stepped back.

"What happened here?" she asked Renee, looking at the flattened cabins that were almost hidden by the vegetation now.

"Lucifer sent a few planes when Dean and the army marched on Atlanta," Renee said, looking around. "We didn't have much warning, and they hit the camps with bombs. There were five camps then, Chitaqua," she said, gesturing around them. "Tawas, Sable, Lake West and South Farm."

"Tawas was alright?"

"Yes, and Lake West survived, Jo and Tim took down the planes with the artillery we'd mounted. The others were destroyed." Renee drew in a breath as her memories of those days came back and crowded around her. They hadn't known if the attack had meant that the battle in Atlanta had failed, hadn't known if the devil would send more planes and bombs to wipe them out. She pushed the past away and looked at Alex. "Anything coming back?"

Alex shook her head, walking down toward the lake. She stopped at the end of the path and stared at the vast stretch of water in front of her, the light breeze wrinkling the surface and making the sunlight fracture and dance, light spearing into her eyes as she narrowed them.

_Dean's face, twisted up in misery, his eyes not seeing her, not seeing anything on the outside, seeing memories instead._

The vision hit her out of the blue and she staggered a little with the force of it, closing her eyes and pressing her fingertips against her forehead as it was accompanied by a violent stab of pain, in her head, down the length of her arms and legs.

_A garden, filled with green, growing things, smelling of the rich earth and the sweetness of herbs, bathed in sunshine that warmed her back as she bent over to pick something. Children's voices, raised high in perfect harmony, coloured-lights reflecting from the snow and lighting the edges of his profile as he'd leaned on the porch railing. The stench of decomposition, sweet-sour and a light-headedness that sucked her down into the black._

"Alex, are you alright?" Renee's voice next to her, a hand curving around her shoulder.

"Yeah," she managed to say, straightening up and opening her eyes as the pain dissipated. "Flashes, nothing to anchor them to."

"That's better than nothing at all, though, right?"

Smiling politely at the other woman, Alex wondered about that. At least she remembered him, she thought, if only in slivers of time. There was still no sense of connection, no feeling to accompany those glimpses that could give her an idea of what she'd felt back then.

"Come on, we should get back," Renee said, a thread of worry in her voice. Alex glanced at her and nodded.

"Maybe Meredith's right," she said uncertainly. "Maybe it'll all come back."

"I hope so," Renee said, slipping an arm around her when she stumbled over the rough ground. "I know it sounds weird, but I really miss you."

* * *

><p>The bedroom was lit with the flickering light and shadow of the dying fire, a crackle on the hearth as the last charred pieces of a log fell into pieces with a soft shower of sparks. Alex rolled restlessly in the bed, her skin gleaming with perspiration, her breath hitching in little gasps and moans, the dream's vivid power holding her in a tangle of memory and emotion. <em>I do, you know<em>. The touch of his mouth, burning over her skin and lighting up her nerves. A deeper, wilder thrill of connection, between them, not just physical, not just emotional, but deeper still, reaching in, reaching through, so exposed and vulnerable … and safe. His expression, a little uncertain, looking at her as if he'd wanted to know what she'd been thinking, feeling, but not yet confident enough to ask. _I do love you_.

She came to with a start, sitting up and staring at the fire, eyes wide as sensation rippled through her, caught up with images and a voice and the faintest scent of gun oil that seemed to linger on in the quiet room. It wasn't the remnants of physical memory that tore through her chest, but a piercing agony of loss, an unbearable yearning that filled her eyes and throat, knees drawn up to her chest as she tried to muffle the rush of grief against her arms, feeling it rend and tear, not really knowing what she was grieving for.

* * *

><p><em><strong>November 10, 2013. West Keep, Kansas<strong>_

The bare metal frame sat on blocks in the big bay, the overhead lights showing every speck of rust and dust and the fatigue cracks along the stress points. Dean walked around it, studying it objectively for what could be repaired and what would have to be replaced, his mind automatically calculating the work that the job would take and all the materials he'd need.

Outside, the wind moaned through the tunnels and baileys, around the stone corners, torn streamers of cloud thickening as the storm approached and the temperature dropped steadily. Inside, the noise was muted, the encroaching cold offset by the two drums glowing a deep red and radiating heat from both sides of the workshop, and the jeans and t-shirt he wore were comfortable enough as he dropped to the floor and wriggled over the concrete to check the axles and rails.

"Dean!"

He turned his head and looked over to the door, seeing Ben standing there as an icy draught whistled along the floor and hit his shoulders.

"Here," he said, rolling over and getting to his feet, grabbing the plaid shirt and jacket from the bench and pulling them on as Ben looked at him from the open door. "Shut the damned door!"

Ben stepped inside and pulled the door closed quickly.

"Two new people just came in, Rufus is looking for you," he said, his gaze slipping over what was left of the car sorrowfully. "He said it was urgent."

"Okay, I'm coming." Dean zipped up the coat and pulled the collar up as he walked across to the boy. They stepped through the door into the freezing bailey and he yanked it closed behind him. "What kind of people, Ben?"

"An old man and a girl, about ten or eleven," Ben said, hunching up against the wind as they hurried through the tunnel.

Looking up at the black and threatening afternoon sky, Dean's brows drew together. What the hell were a couple like that doing out in weather like this, he wondered irritably. Bad enough people were being hunted by monsters, he didn't need them dying through a preventable lack of commonsense as well.

They ran across the north bailey and up the keep steps as a flurry of sleet swept toward the big door. Wrestling it open and then closed again behind them, Dean looked around the massive front hall.

"In the office?"

Ben nodded, pulling off his coat and hanging it up. He hesitated for a moment, watching the hunter disappear down the narrow hallway to the left, then turned in the opposite direction, feeling the warmth of the living room, with its big fire that was lit almost all the time, melting away the chill from his hands and neck.

* * *

><p>Rufus looked up as the door opened and gave Dean a bland look. In front of the desk, the old man and girl stood, both dripping onto the floor, their hair plastered down over their scalps and down the sides of their faces.<p>

"Not the greatest weather for travelling," Dean remarked in their direction as he walked in. The man was perhaps five foot nine, covered from neck to knee in an oversized coat, his hair white, his face thin and seamed with wrinkles. The girl, tall and skinny for her age, was Ute, he thought, long black hair hanging in rat's tails, dark eyes bright, her face still rounded as a child's.

"Yes, I thought the storm would take a little longer to build up than it did," the man replied, his gaze flitting from the hunter's damp, short, dark hair to the oil-stained leather boots and back to his face. "My name is Mattie. This is Mariana."

"Dean Winchester," Dean said, leaning back against the desk. "Rufus introduced himself?"

"Yes, he has," Mattie said. "I understood that there was an order of scholars here."

Dean glanced at Rufus, who raised one brow sharply, and looked back at the old man. "There are," he said, keeping his face expressionless. "They'll be locked up tight for the night now. What did you want to see them about?"

"I have information for them," Mattie said, looking up as the door opened again and Maria came in followed by Jackson. "Vital information."

"This is Jackson Darrow and, uh, Maria Forturoso," Dean said, glancing over his shoulder at them. "They run this place."

"Ah," Mattie said, looking from Jackson back to Dean. "I was under the impression that you were the decision-maker here."

Dean shook his head, hiding the flash of surprise at the comment. "Nope, that'd be Jackson."

"What can we do you for?" Jackson asked, taking Dean's place at the desk as the younger man walked around it to stand beside Rufus.

"As I explained to these gentlemen, I have important information for the scholars who reside here."

"Well, they're not actually in the keep, sir," Jackson said, looking at the little girl. "And that storm's right on top of us now, whiteout in every direction. You and your little friend should get dried off, have something to eat. We can offer you a bed for the night at least, see if we can get you over to the order in the morning."

"That's very kind of you, Mr Darrow, but the matter is urgent," Mattie said.

"We're hungry," Mariana said suddenly, looking up at Jackson.

"There you go," the farmer said comfortably. "You two look like you've come a-ways, another twelve hours won't change the fate of world – will it?"

Dean watched the old man's face twitch as he reluctantly accepted the impasse and the offer. He ducked his head, muttering to Rufus from one side of his mouth.

"Keep an eye on them."

Rufus straightened up and stretched. "An' you'll be?"

"Around."

As Maria fussed around the little girl, he sidled around the walls of the office toward the door, almost making it out when a hand closed around his arm. Mattie stood behind him, washed-out pale blue eyes studying him.

"Winchester was one of the names I was supposed to look for," the old man said in a low voice.

"Maybe," Dean nodded, looking down at the hand curled around his forearm. "My brothers are Winchesters too."

"And one of them is a part of the order of scholars?"

"Both, actually," Dean told him.

"But not you."

Dean's mouth twisted up to one side. "Not really my thing," he said, stepping toward the door, the old man's hand dropping free of him. "I'll take you over there in the morning."

Mattie nodded and turned back to Maria as she approached him, and Dean slipped out of the study.

Sam might have a better handle on the old guy, he thought, heading for the kitchen. If not, Jerome and Jasper and Katherine would certainly take him apart and find out what he was selling.

* * *

><p>Michelle was stirring a huge pot of something hot at the stoves when he walked in, glancing over her shoulder at him.<p>

"There you are," she said without preamble. "Merrin said to let you know that the apartment's been cleaned but she left your stuff in it."

"Thanks," Dean mumbled, taking a fresh loaf from the counter and slicing off several pieces.

"And Vince is back –"

"When did he get back?" he cut in, looking up from buttering the bread.

"Just a few minutes ago," she said, taking a bowl and filling it for him. "Came in just in front of the storm, he said –"

"Thanks," Dean said through a mouthful of bread and hot stew, hurriedly finishing both and leaving the bowl on the table.

"Good way to get indigestion, that," she commented as he wheeled around and headed back for the main hall.

* * *

><p>Several boxes and army bags were sitting there, surrounded by puddles of melting snow. Vince came down the stairs and grinned at him, going past to pick up another three bags and tucking two of the boxes under one arm.<p>

"Won't be long, just gotta get these squared away," the hunter said to him cheerfully, heading for the stairs again. Dean watched him taking them three at a time, and turned as he felt a light touch on his arm.

Alex was standing behind him, a sling across her chest holding a sleeping baby and another in her arms, her coat and the scarf over her head beaded with moisture. Every time he saw her, she looked a little different, from the time before, from the way he remembered before that. It was disorienting and unsettling that he kept seeing things he didn't think he'd seen before, or maybe hadn't noticed. It wasn't as bad in person as it was in the dreams, where he was forced to relive several memories of different times, often together, laid one on top of the other, out of order and out of his control.

At the intensity of his gaze, her eyes cut away, looking at the remaining boxes and bags dripping on the floor. He knew he stared, when she was looking somewhere else. Just looking at her hurt as well, but it was something he couldn't help doing. Her cheeks were reddened now, the shadows around her eyes a little deeper and as she drew in a deep breath, he realised she was nervous about being there, standing next to him, about whatever it she wanted to say. He felt the same way.

"I wanted to ask you," she said, her eyes lifting to meet his for a moment then cutting away to the staircase. "If you aren't using the apartment upstairs, could I perhaps take it over?" She gestured at the pile of boxes still sitting in the hall. "Renee took a lot of my stuff back to Tawas, and I'd like to be able –"

Her reason for approaching him, reason for talking to him, the reason for her unease and nervousness, became apparent in discrete chunks, one after the other, and his gaze dropped to the floor as he caught up, nodding quickly.

"Sure, yeah, I wanted to tell you – I went to see –" he said disjointedly, seeing her trying to follow what he wasn't saying properly and turning away to look at the remaining boxes. "These are yours? I can take them up."

"Uh, that's okay, I know you're busy, Vince –"

"No problem," he insisted, getting the last two boxes under each arm, grabbing the three remaining bags in his hands. "You know where it is?"

She nodded as he started up the stairs, and he heard her footsteps behind him. It wasn't the way he'd planned to have this conversation. This first conversation. He wasn't sure why the hell that mattered, but for some reason it did.

At the heavy footsteps coming down, Dean looked up and saw Vince on the stairs above him. The younger man gave him a quizzical look and he dropped his gaze, walking past without saying a word. He heard Vince stop when he reached Alex and slowed, half-turning to see the man standing beside her.

"I can take Evelyn for you, if you want?" Vince said, looking at the bundle of blankets and barely visible child in her arms.

"Thanks, I'm fine, there wasn't anything left in the truck, was there?" she asked, looking back down to the hall.

"Pretty sure not, but I'll check," he promised, hurrying down the stairs.

Dean started climbing again as he heard Alex coming after him, lengthening his stride to reach the apartment before she caught up to him. The door stood open and a pile of damp bags and boxes filled the centre of the living room. Dropping the ones he was carrying on top of the rest, he swung around and reached the front door as she did, standing aside as she walked past him and closing it behind her.

"Thank you." She walked into the living room and looked around slowly, and he wondered if she remembered any of it. He licked his lips, looking for something to say to her, now that they were talking. Sort of talking, he amended.

"Uh, there's still some of my stuff here," he said, gesturing toward the bedroom. "I can get it tomorrow – or later on – or uh, whenever."

"That's fine, whenever it suits you," she said distractedly, looking around for a place to set down the child she was holding. "Would you mind holding Evelyn for a moment? I can't get the sling off one-handed."

_Hold a baby?_ For a second, the image crashed against everything that'd happened in the last ten years and he hesitated. _How far I'll go … not my life … you don't think you deserve to be saved? … dead inside …_ too many moments of not believing and not enough of them with her to get past them.

_For fuck's sake, it's your kid. Sack up!_ The thought broke through a wall he hadn't known was there and he walked toward her and took the wrapped baby from her a little nervously, looking down into the peacefully sleeping face as he tucked her into the crook of his arm. The feel of the child in his arms brought on a confusing mix of feelings, none predominant, all of them distantly familiar, his throat thickening a little with their strength.

_A father_.

Whether he could deal with it or not, that's what he was now and looking at the small face, framed by the soft blanket and resting against him, he felt an odd sensation, a doubling-up of memory, moments laid one over another, seeing his father holding Sam, red-faced and newborn, the tough Marine looking down with a soft half-smile; hard, calloused hands incredibly gentle as he'd tucked the blanket closer around his youngest son.

He glanced over at Alex as she lifted the sling over her head and settled the other child against the back of the sofa, tucking pillows around him to stop him from rolling off. _A daughter_, he thought, looking down at the infant in his arm, _and a son_. And it should've been different, not like this, holding them for the first time so many weeks after they'd been born. It should've been different and he closed his eyes briefly, pushing back at what he'd wanted, what he still wanted. The choice was still there. He could turn away now, and walk – and _forget_ about them, let them find _someone else_ – or he could stay, live with whatever that cost him, be there and do what he could, what she'd let him.

Alex arranged more cushions into a corral further along the sofa and turned back to him, holding out her arms. Dean passed her the sleeping baby a little reluctantly, watching as she settled her into the makeshift cot.

"Thanks, need more than two hands sometimes," she said, straightening up and turning back to him with a hesitant smile. She was still nervous of him, he realised, the recognition stabbing into him. He ducked his head to hide it from her and looked down at the two children.

"You, uh, named them?" he asked, flicking a glance at her uncomfortably.

To his surprise, she looked away, a faint flush of red rising up her neck. "I'm sorry, we could change the names, if you don't like them, Merrin just wanted names for the birth records and I asked Sam and Rufus and Bobby what they thought you'd like but they can be changed if you don't –"

He shook his head at the fast-delivered explanation, hearing the unforeseen and unneeded apology in her voice with a rush of guilt. "What are they?"

"What?"

"Their names," he said, waving a hand at the sofa.

"Oh, James John and Evelyn Mary," Alex said, colour suffusing her cheeks as she followed his gaze.

He repeated the names in his head slowly. James, for Jim Murphy, he thought, wondering which hunter had suggested that. He wasn't as certain about including his father's name. And the girl, it was a nice name, not hard to say, not hard to remember. Sam had definitely been responsible of their mother's name being included.

"No, I like them," he said, drawing in a deep breath and smiling a little lop-sidedly at her, too aware that they were strangers. He was a stranger to her. She nodded and looked away, her gaze moving around the mild chaos of the room.

"I need to get the cot from downstairs," she said, looking at the hall that led to the bedroom, forehead a little creased as the thought hit her. "Would it be okay if you watched them? Just for a few minutes?"

The request hit him unexpectedly, a double-whammy of having two babies in his sole care, even for a few minutes, and the startling recognition that he wanted that chance. "That's – uh – I can get that, you don't have to –"

"I've been sitting in a truck with stiff suspension for two days – believe me, I'm glad for the chance to use my arms and legs," she said with a rueful smile. "I won't be long, it's just a couple of floors down."

"Sure, no," he agreed helplessly, looking down at the sleeping infants on the sofa. "Yeah, go ahead."

He heard the door close behind her and sat on the edge of the table next to the sofa. In front of him, the children slept, oblivious to the chaos around them, the contradictory tsunamis of emotion in their parents. Evelyn Mary. It suited the small face, framed with its soft tuft of strawberry blonde hair. He looked at the boy, less hair and what there was, a pale blond. In a box in the car there was a picture of himself somewhere around that age, he thought absently. He wondered if there was a resemblance. The thought, as fleeting as it was, brought a faint self-derisory smile to his face. _Not my life_, he'd told Lisa, back in Cicero when he'd been on the one-way road. _One day, you're gonna want a family, Dean_, his father had said to him, one night, cleaning guns, talking about nothing. He hadn't believed it then. He wasn't sure it was a good idea now. But he wasn't going to run.

He stood abruptly, rubbing his hands over his face and looking around the apartment. So Renee had been the one behind clearing out the apartment. He wouldn't have guessed it'd be her. Or maybe she'd just taken the stuff. At least it hadn't been handed out to other people or thrown, he thought.

Alex would be living here, with their children. He'd said, take it. Now, he realised he wasn't so sure about that. It'd been their place. Their only place aside from the tent on the shore of the lake and one of the rooms in the order's safehold for a couple of weeks. There was a part of him that thought of the apartment as 'home' even though he'd abandoned it. Looking bleakly around at the familiar rooms, he realised that it'd only been 'home' when she'd been there as well.

The door opened and he turned to the hall, seeing a large cot, a pair of legs visible under it, walk down the hall and stop next to the living room. He heard the door close behind them.

"Just in the bedroom, thanks, Vince," Alex said, walking in after the hunter and looking at Dean. "Thank you for watching them."

He lifted a shoulder in a half-shrug, waiting for Vince to get his ass out of their - the bedroom and out of the apartment so that he could say what he wanted to say to her without an audience.

"I put it between the bed and the window, that okay? Anything else you need?" Vince came out of the hall and looked at Alex expectantly.

"No, that's great," she told him, looking up at him and smiling. With Vince, the smile was uncomplicated, Dean thought. Easy and natural.

"Thank you, for the ride and the help with everything," Alex continued, half-turning for the door. Vince hesitated, looking at Dean, one brow raised.

"You wanted to talk about something?"

"Later," Dean said shortly, the forced smile not reaching his eyes as he watched the other man walk slowly for the door.

"Anything you want help with, just let me know," Vince said to Alex as he left, and Dean's jaw tightened again. _Good to know everyone was so fucking helpful_.

The door closed and Alex walked back down the hall, her hand rising, pushing the drying tangle of curls back from her forehead and the characteristic gesture caught at him, closing his throat for a moment as he watched her. Too many things did that. Looking away, he tried to shut them out and remember what he was here for.

"You and Vince seem to be getting on pretty well," he said, making it not quite a question.

It was flat-out stupid to feel possessive about her, he told himself. To feel jealous about someone else trying to be of help. He should be feeling relieved that she'd had others to lean on while he'd been AWOL. None of the arguments registered against the cold feeling in his stomach, the one that suggested that he'd done too little and was there too late.

"Two days in a truck tends keep conversation going pretty effectively," she said with a sigh, looking around at the piles of boxes and bags on the floor. "He's a nice man."

"Yeah," Dean said repressively, and pushed the thought out of his head. "I wanted to tell you before you left that this place is yours, whenever you wanted it."

"Thanks," she said, glancing up at him. "Meredith suggested the change of scene. She thought I'd remember more in Michigan, you know, looking at the camps there. I wanted to get it over with."

"Did it work?" he asked her, curiosity overriding his reticence.

She looked at the floor for a long moment and he thought she wasn't going to answer that, then she looked up with a small shrug. "A little, I guess. I got – flashes, I guess – fragments mostly, but I couldn't put them together, or make much sense out of them."

Dropping his gaze, he wondered what she meant, what the fragments had been of, if she'd remembered anything about him. He couldn't ask those things.

Alex walked around the sofa and perched on the edge of the armchair, shoulders a little hunched.

"I remembered my name and my father and where I was born and that my mother had died. I remembered that Dad and I were close, and that I was devastated when he died," she said slowly, looking up at him. He walked to the other armchair and sat down, waiting for her.

"That's about it, except for little things," she said, lifting a hand helplessly. "Renee said I'd been married, before the virus. She told me about the camp, and I almost remembered a bit about it – I mean, it wasn't much, just that I'd thought I'd try to get it going for disadvantaged kids." Her gaze fell to her hands, curled together on her knees. "There are great big chunks missing and I don't know why. I mean, the doctors, and Merrin, everyone says it's due to the trauma of whatever happened. But I don't understand why I wouldn't remember things that happened before it, before the virus, when things were normal."

Dean felt his chest tighten, wondering unhappily if it was going to be up to him to tell her, again, of what he knew of her marriage and life before Pestilence had changed the whole world. He didn't know if he could do that. There had been a lot of bad memories, he realised. A lot of pain even before the end of the world. Wasn't it a good thing if those memories were all gone?

"To be honest," she continued carefully, her gaze still on her hands. "A lot of the little pieces I did get flashes of were of you."

Looking back at her, a thread of uneasiness at what she wasn't saying wound coldly through him. "You don't sound all that happy about that."

She didn't answer for a moment and the unease in him deepened. He knew the expression on her face – she was weighing up what to say, pro and con – and he thought that some of the flashes she'd had of him had either scared or shocked her.

"It's not – like I said, they were – out of context – and I didn't know what they meant," she told him, glancing up to see his expression. "They seemed to be from there, at the destroyed camp, I mean. Some weren't, but I don't know where they were from."

He nodded, hoping it looked like an understanding nod. He didn't think he could go through those memories with her, try and make sense of them or put them into a framework. There was too much that needed explaining. Too much he wasn't sure he could explain.

"A lot happened, in the last three years," he said, as cautious about how to phrase what he said as she'd been. "Things happened to you that, most of the time, only you knew about. We found something, in the Grigori base in Utah. A machine –"

* * *

><p>His voice disappeared and for a split-second, Alex saw a bright, white light, heard a deep thudding, a mechanical thudding, the vibrations going through her bones and teeth. <em>White walls and the light getting brighter, painfully bright, searingly bright<em>.

* * *

><p>"– Jerome and Sam and Katherine are looking that stuff now, they might come up with something that'll help," Dean was saying, his gaze moving around the room, and she looked at him, blinking rapidly as the memory vanished, aware she'd missed some of what he'd said.<p>

He glanced at the sofa, and the sleeping children, rising from the chair. "I don't want to hold you up from getting some rest, or whatever you have to do," he said, uncomfortably aware that he'd run out of excuses for being here, that the only other thing he needed to tell her was going to be hard to get out.

Alex nodded, getting to her feet, and he followed her slowly to the hall.

"Listen," he started to say and stopped, swallowing against the shivery flutter that had manifested suddenly inside his stomach. "I'm sorry I wasn't around, before." Her eyes widened slightly, and he hurried on, "Not exactly my finest moment there. I – they're …"

Glancing back toward the living room, he lifted a hand in a vague gesture. "I want them to know – y'know – I can't –"

Alex watched him struggling with the words for a moment and nodded. "It's okay. I would never have told them anything other than the truth anyway."

Dean sucked in a deep breath, ducking his head. "If you need help, of any kind, you come to me first, okay?"

He looked up when she didn't answer straight away. He couldn't identify the expression in her eyes, some combination of relief and a caution that matched his own, perhaps.

"I mean that," he insisted, his voice deepening a fraction.

"Alright."

"Good." He let out the breath he hadn't realised he'd been holding. "Great. Okay, then. I'll, uh, get going."

"Dean."

He turned back from the door, picking up the urgency that underlaid her voice. She wasn't looking at him.

"Before … all this," she said tentatively, lifting her gaze to meet his. "Did we, um, feel the same way? About each other, I mean?"

Forcing himself to keep his gaze on hers, against the desire to look somewhere else, anywhere else, his heart stuttered uncomfortably against his ribs at the question. He hadn't said it then. Had felt it, had wanted to say it … but hadn't. He'd thought he have time.

"Yeah, we did," he said, knowing he was admitting as much to himself as to her. "We felt the same way."

She nodded and turned away. He stood for a moment in front of the door, his eyes closing as he reached for the knob and pulled it open, went through and closed it behind him.

In the silence of the hall, he leaned back against the wall beside the apartment door, heartbeat hammering at the base of his throat. Being in there, close enough to touch but separated by a wall he didn't know how to get through, and couldn't have tried to breach anyway, not without seeing her want that too, had been harder than he could've possibly imagined.

* * *

><p><em><strong>Litteris Hominae, Kansas<strong>_

Snow blanketed the keep and Dean walked down through the tunnel to Franklin's workshops with it squeaking under his boots. The wind had died away early in the morning but the sky was still leaden, achingly cold and threatening more snow later, he thought.

He'd spent the night wrestling with the past and the lack of sleep was dogging him as he pulled open the steel doors to the garage, the bright red vehicle inside barely visible in the gloom. Rufus and Jackson hadn't gotten much more out of the old man after he'd left them to it. They'd told him that he'd just kept insisting that he had to speak to someone from the order and when he'd come down the keep stairs an hour ago, both man and girl had been sitting close to the fire in the living room, waiting for him to take them across to the safehold.

The engine started up with a low chugging roar, and he backed the susvee out, tracks clanking loudly as it turned in the bailey, the noise bouncing from the walls. Inside the cab, the heater blew warmish air over his legs as the engine warmed up and his eyes narrowed against the flat grey light, manoeuvring the clunky square vehicle to enter the tunnel.

* * *

><p>Even in deep snow, the susvee's abilities made the trip short. Dean glanced at his passengers as he slowed down in front of the invisible entrance to the safehold. Both had passed all the tests. He was reasonably certain he wasn't leading an enemy into the order, but he had the Colt and the serrated knife on him, just in case.<p>

"Hiding in illusion," Mattie said quietly, looking around as he got out. "And warded."

Dean didn't comment on that as the forest and mist dissolved around them and the deep thunks of the locking rings released the tenons. He gestured at the door as it swung open, catching Sam's raised brows and giving his brother a small shrug. Mattie and Mariana walked inside past the tall hunter, barely looking at Sam when they saw the gallery and room beyond.

"Who're they?" Sam asked, closing the door when Dean walked through.

"Good question," Dean replied unhelpfully, his fingers resting lightly against the Colt's wooden grip. "Turned up just before the storm yesterday and insisted he had something for the order," he added when Sam stepped beside him and they started down the stairs. "Something vital."

In the situation room, Jerome turned the wheelchair and faced the old man and young girl, his face expressionless.

"Jerome, this is Mattie and Mariana," Dean said casually, leaning against the lit table. "Mattie here says he has something to show you."

"You're a legacy?" Mattie took a step closer to Jerome, holding out his hand.

"Yes," Jerome said, taking the offered hand warily. "You know of the order?"

The old man smiled suddenly. "Oh yes, I know something of this group," he said, turning to look up at Jasper and Katherine, standing on the library steps and watching him. "I gave them their first glimpses into the world behind the world, helping them take their first steps."

"Really?" Dean asked dubiously. "How's that again?"

Mattie turned to look at him. "It's a long story, but worth, I think, the telling. Is there somewhere more comfortable we can retire to?"

* * *

><p>Sam flicked a curious glance at his brother. Dean sat on the other side of the table, leaning back in the chair, his face shuttered as he watched the old man talking, whatever he thought of the story hidden behind the half-hooded eyes.<p>

_Metatron_, he thought, looking back at the man. The Scribe and Voice of God.

"There was an earth movement, a few months ago," the fallen angel said. "And the shift in the rock freed me."

Watching the look exchanged between Jerome and Felix, Sam remembered the sudden appearance of the ninth location on the situation table. In Colorado.

"Who's the girl?" Katherine asked, her gaze shifting to Mariana and back to the angel.

"She was alone in Ignacio, surviving," Metatron said, lifting one shoulder slightly. "When I emerged, she was able to give me food, and we found shelter."

Sam felt a spasm of distaste for the cool tone of the angel's voice. The girl had obviously kept them both alive, but he couldn't see any kind of gratitude for it in Metatron's expression. He looked across the room as Marla made a small disapproving noise in her throat.

"I gave the tablets to the Watchers," Metatron continued. "But there were records in the library that could provide enough information for Camael to find the Irin and extract the exact locations for the tablets from them."

Jasper exhaled softly. "He's after the angel tablet, isn't he?"

"He will be after all of them, the one you hold here as well," Metatron said, an edge along his voice. "The tablets have the power of the Word, even if two are brought together, and Camael will want all of them in his possession."

"We can't pinpoint the exact sites, although your sigil gave us a key for their general locations." Jerome's brows drew together.

"The Qaddiysh said that they were hidden beyond man or angel's power to find them," Jasper added mildly.

"Nothing can remain hidden," Metatron corrected the scholar. "And Camael now has nothing to lose from whatever action he might choose to take. He is out in the open, pursued by the Grigori he has betrayed, as well as by Heaven."

"You think he'll go to Jordan," Dean said quietly.

The scribe turned to look at him, nodding. "I believe he will kill and torture the keepers to get the locations. There is no other way for him to find the tablets now."

Dean leaned on the counter beside Jerome, staring at the screen. "Can we get through to them? Warn them, at least?"

"I'm trying," Jerome said testily. "I've let Michel and Rodriguez know. If they can't get through with a scrying spell, Maria will be able to get to Jordan the quickest."

Dean rubbed a hand over his eyes. Quick was a relative term these days. It would take the Vatican hunter at least a month to sail from the island chapter to the coast of Israel, he thought.

"I'll call Cas," he said reluctantly. "Tonight, if you haven't gotten a confirmation before then."

Jerome exhaled, looking at the screen. He knew that the hunter wanted nothing more to do with Heaven, but it would be the fastest and the most secure way to let the Qaddiysh know that Camael was probably heading for them.

"You got any information about that machine yet?" Dean asked, pushing aside his misgivings about asking for help from the angel as he straightened and shifted his position against the counter.

"We haven't narrowed down the precise nature of the chemicals Alex was given," Jerome said, turning to look up at him. "The procedure was a combination of scientific and magical, the machine seemed to be designed to duplicate every cell and the circles and spells were limitations on that process, to keep it from occurring too fast, or getting out of control. The details are … unsavoury, to say the least. It appears they used ongoing pain as the means to access the memories, transferring them to the copy which was probably another person, originally, stripped and remade to resemble her down to the last detail. According to the notes on their computers, that transference went both ways, the mental torture from the original to the copy, and the physical agony from the copy back to the original. It is very likely that the repeated process on Alex is the reason for the amnesia."

"Anything in those notes about why they would do it?" Dean asked, his tone carefully neutral. He could talk about this crap only as long as he kept his reactions completely walled off. "It didn't have much of a pay-off for them."

"Nothing so far," Jerome said gently. "From the psychological notes Francesca and Alain worked up on Baeder and Lehmann, however, a certain amount of personal satisfaction might have been involved, both in relation to the expected effect on you, and for themselves."

"So they just liked it?"

Jerome grimaced and looked back at the screen. "That might've been a part of it. They might have been using her to test the capabilities of the machine, with the plan of duplicating themselves at some point," he added. "There's a lot more information we haven't yet gone through."

Dean remembered Baeder's face, when the razor-edged knout had been aimed at him. He thought that Grigori might've rationalised any number of reasons for doing what they'd done. None of them would help him get through to the woman they'd done it to.

"Thanks," he said to the scholar as he stood up. "Not a real lot of help."

"No," Jerome agreed. "Before … a few months ago I asked Alex if she would be interested in helping us here," he said hesitantly. "At the time, she was running the keep and told me she was happy to be doing that. I know Maria and Freddie have taken that over."

Dean turned his head to look at him. "Get to the point, Jerome."

"It might be helpful to her if she worked with us, here," Jerome said, gesturing around the room. "She helped enormously with Chuck's translations of the tablet, and she had the abilities required, long before –"

Nodding abruptly, Dean said, "Tell Sam to go see her about it."

"Sam said you were talking to her again, Dean."

He ducked his head, mouth twisting up a little in acknowledgement. "I don't know how helpful it would be for her to be here," he said tersely. "You want to recruit her, Jerome, get someone else to do it. Don't ask me."

"Alright." Jerome looked at him understandingly. "Has she remembered anything else?"

"She said she's getting some flashes of stuff," Dean said. "Out of order, no framework to fit them into."

"That's a good sign," Jerome said thoughtfully. "Her mind is attempting to find the reconnections."

"Maybe," Dean said, turning to the library steps. "Let me know if you don't get through by dark."

* * *

><p>Metatron looked around the office, and back to the thin, tired-looking man behind the desk. On the desk's blotter, the tablet gleamed in the lamp-light beside the closed laptop and he dragged his attention from it, focussing on the prophet.<p>

"What have you learned from the Demon tablet?"

Chuck looked down at the stone with a slight shrug, gesturing around the room at the piles of typed transcriptions that covered almost every available horizontal surface.

"The gates are closed," he said. "That was the main purpose of it."

The archangel smiled thinly as he sat down in the armchair in front of the desk. "Not at all, that was merely a technical accomplishment. You haven't felt the power?"

"Oh, I can feel it," Chuck said dryly. "I can't access it. Can't even figure who might be able to or how."

"You are studying the tablet as a whole, however?" Metatron pressed, leaning forward against the edge of the desk. "You understand that it is truly more than the sum of its parts?"

"Yeah, that came across," the writer replied. "The conduit, the blackouts … was it like that for you when you were writing it?"

"I didn't write it, my dear prophet," Metatron said, looking down at the stone again. "I just transcribed it. I don't think the process was quite the same for me as it is for you."

"These tablets, they're a weapon, right?" Chuck leaned forward. "A way for people to get everything back into a lock-box and keep it there?"

"Yes, but not precisely," Metatron said. "They are weapon and illumination and a means for speaking with the Creator, understanding the purpose of the creation."

"Clear as mud," Chuck said. "I can talk to God through this?"

"No." Metatron shook his head. "You can listen. It will be someone else who will be able to make the connection between the tablets and speak to God."

"Wow, what's my upside for all this, then?"

"Upside?"

"What do I get out of it?" Chuck clarified, a little sourly. "What's in it for me?"

"You are my prophet, the Almighty's prophet," Metatron said, his mouth lifting on one side. "You have been honoured."

"Oh, well, that makes it all worthwhile."

"That is sarcasm, I believe?"

Chuck looked at him flatly. "Yeah."

The angel reached across the desk, his fingers curling around Chuck's wrist. "It is not our place to question the Word," he said, staring into Chuck's eyes. "We are the messengers, not the message."

Chuck stiffened as the fingers tightened, pressing his skin against the bones. His head fell back and his eyes closed as images poured through his mind's eye, fast and sharp and vividly clear.

Metatron released his grip and stood up as he watched the prophet's eyes moving rapidly under his closed lids. The first step had been completed and the pieces were moving into place for the next to begin. The prophet needed the other tablets, he knew. Closing his eyes, he could almost reach out to the power he needed to be able to see and feel the others of his kind on this plane. Almost. But not quite.

* * *

><p>Dean sat in the office, looking at his brother. "So … you came back from the dead?"<p>

Sam's lips curled up wryly. "Not like it hasn't happened before."

"Yeah, but …" Dean shrugged, turning to look at the fire. "No deal this time."

"Oh, there was a deal," Sam said. His brow furrowed as he tried to remember the elusive fragments of memory he still glimpsed, from time to time. "I don't remember what happened, while I was dead," he said slowly. "But I can't shake the feeling that I turned down an offer."

"What kind of offer?"

"Peace, I think," Sam said, hands spreading to either side helplessly. "When I came to, there was just this strong impression that I could've gone on, not come back."

"What made you change your mind?"

Sam looked at Dean's expression, a mix of feelings that he was familiar enough with on his brother's face.

"I didn't want to disappoint you," he said softly.

For a long moment, Dean just looked at him, his face drawn and his eyes dark. "Sam, you never disappointed me," he said finally, turning away, one shoulder hunching a little higher than the other, as if he expected a blow.

"I made the wrong choices, Dean," his brother said, raising his voice slightly, not willing this time to let his brother's dislike of the conversation turn him aside. "And most of the time, you were the one who paid for them."

Dean shook his head. "No harm, no foul, right?"

"No, not right," Sam said forcefully, lurching forward in the chair. "I'm sorry."

"Don't."

The single word was loaded with a plea and Sam's face screwed up in frustration.

"You can't keep finding excuses for me, Dean."

The snort that came from the other chair surprised him.

"I'm not," Dean said, turning back to look at him. "Trust me, I'm not doing that again. It's just …" he trailed away, eyes rolling a little. "It's done. Alright? It's over. So much shit happened in the last six months – fuck, in the last three years, five years, forever – I'm – I can't keep going right now."

"What do you mean?" Sam asked, as shocked by the open admission as he was by the words.

"We're in it again." Dean was looking at the floor, visibly searching for some way to explain what he needed to. "I mean, the angels, the Watchers, this goddamned scribe showing up and the vamp attacks, all of it, it's not full throttle yet, but it's going to be."

Lifting his head, his expression twisted as he looked at his brother. "Alex is back, Sam, and I got two kids I don't want to let down. You got a girl … and we don't have any fucking time to deal with anything, but somehow we gotta make the time because I – I – this is what I'll fight for, this is the _only_ thing I'll fight for."

Sam frowned. "Okay, I get that. What do you want to do?"

Dean laughed, a sour bark. "Fuck, I don't know. I want – I need – some time to get everything straightened out, but there's no way I'm gonna get that."

"Make it," Sam said abruptly, understanding what Dean meant finally. "Make the time."

His brother's dry silence was an eloquent comment on that and Sam shook his head impatiently. "You can. We're not doing anything until after winter, we won't be able to move at all if we get anymore storms like last night's –"

"I told Jerome I'd call Cas, tonight, if he couldn't get through to the Watchers."

Sam sucked in a deep breath. "Cas doesn't need you to hold his hand to check on them." He stared at him, seeing the doubts that were lying just below the surface of his brother. "This is about Alex, isn't it? What happened? You said you two talked?"

"She doesn't remember any of the crap that happened to her, Sam," Dean said after a moment, chewing on the corner of his lip as he thought about that. "Not before the virus either."

"And?" Sam asked, trying to work out what had changed for his brother. "We knew that."

Dean smiled humourlessly as he looked at him. "Yeah," he said. "And I wanted her to remember. I wanted her to remember me, remember us."

"Right," Sam prompted. "So?"

"So maybe that's not what's best for her," Dean said slowly. "Maybe it would be better for her to be able to start again, without those memories, without all that crap."

"Oh," Sam said, leaning back in the chair and studying his brother. "You can't make that choice for her, you know."

"I can stop pushing at her memories," Dean said, his tone defensive as he followed Sam's thoughts.

_You can give up any hope for what you wanted, you mean_, Sam thought, hearing the pain and indecision that riddled his brother's voice below the guilt. He wondered if Dean could turn away, this time.

"There are good memories there, as well as bad," he argued mildly, realising the only reason his brother had even let this out was to be convinced, one way or the other, of what he should do.

He remembered Alex's face, when he'd been turned. Getting past Ellen and ignoring Dean's order, determined to be with him, even if it meant to the end. He'd thought at the time that it'd been her presence there that had given his brother the strength he'd needed to get the vampire hunger under control, a reason to fight it with every particle of will at his disposal.

"She might not want to give up on what she felt for you," he added, watching Dean's face. "And I'm pretty sure, pretty _damned_ sure, you don't want to give that up, either."

"What I wanted didn't work out so good for her," Dean said, his voice low. "Didn't work out for Lisa and Ben either."

"I see, you're just going to lump everyone together in the 'it's-all-my-fault' basket now?"

Dean looked away. "If the cap fits …"

"Except it doesn't, and you know it," Sam retorted. "Or is this easier to give up on than to fight for?"

"What are you talking about?"

"You tell me," he snapped back impatiently. "Loving someone, two kids to look after, that's a lot of responsibility – maybe you're tired of the responsibility and you'd rather not have it on your shoulders anymore?"

"So now I'm a douche as well as gutless?"

"Hey," Sam said, waving his hand. "If the cap fits …"

The smile didn't quite reach his brother's eyes, but it was something, Sam thought with an inward sigh.

"Look, you were ready to give up on doing the trials," he said, shifting in the chair. "Because you wanted a family, you wanted a life with Alex. Are you telling me that's changed? You don't want that anymore?"

Dean leaned back in the chair, eyes closing. "She knew me, then, Sam. Knew everything about me, knew me better than anyone else. She knew it all and …"

Sam looked at him. "She's the same person, Dean. You told her once, you can tell her again. You can get back to that."

Dean shook his head. "I don't think it'll work that way twice."

He would come to his own decision about what to do, Sam told himself. He'd needed to say it out loud, and he had, and that was about all his brother would allow. The rest he had to figure out for himself.

"How's the car?" he asked, seeing Dean's slight twitch of relief at the change of subject.

"In pieces."

* * *

><p><em><strong>Camp Tawas, Michigan<strong>_

Tina McPherson turned around in surprise as the door to the small farmhouse opened and her husband walked in, grinning at her.

"Thought you were going to be another week out there hunting?" she said, tipping her head back as he enfolded her in his arms, his lips trailing along the skin of her neck. "What happened?"

"I've got to go back out," Darren said with a deep sigh against her lips. "But we looped back close, and I told the guys I was gonna spend the night with my wife for a change."

"Good call," she giggled. "Go and get washed up, Della's taken Mikey and Gwen to Tawas for the night, and the babies are already down. We can eat and spend the rest of the night catching up."

He nodded, letting her go and stopping in the hall, looking around. Tina felt a small jolt as she watched him nod and head up the stairs, something in the way he was walking not quite right to her. She shook her head impatiently as a hiss from the stove caught her attention. They'd supposed to have been gone for three weeks, hunting up along the edges of the wilderness on the other side of the state. She was glad they'd headed back toward home. She missed Darren when he was gone, and despite the company of the children, the house felt empty somehow.

An hour later, a moan escaped from her as she arched up involuntarily, waves of pleasure shuddering through her.

"Oh … where did you learn that?!" she asked him when she got her breath back, looking at him as he held himself over her.

"Full of surprises, darlin'," Darren said, and pushed into her, stroking in and out slowly at first, then faster as she pushed back against him. "Gonna make you feel so good."

Tina nodded, unable to spare the breath to agree with him. He filled her up and she wrapped her arms and legs around him, hips rising to match his, thrust for thrust. He'd always been able to turn her on, get her off, but this was something different, she thought incoherently, this was something special.


	4. Chapter 4 A Different View

**Chapter 4 A Different View**

* * *

><p><em><strong>November 21, 2013. Zilina, Slovakia<strong>_

Marc looked at the rapidly falling snowflakes in disgust. More snow would limit their ability to travel even on the surviving roads, and they needed to find shelter tonight, the temperatures were dropping too quickly and the vehicles were not well enough insulated to spend the night in the open any more.

He shifted his gaze to the rear-view mirror, seeing Christophe's compact truck bouncing behind him vaguely through the swirling clouds of snow and tapped the brakes twice in quick succession, a simple signal to let the young man that they would find somewhere to stop soon.

"See anything?" he asked Adrian, flicking a glance sideways.

"The city's old," Adrian said, peering through the fall. "The buildings will have deeper basements, cellars, and we can usually find things to burn." He sat up straighter as a larger building loomed out of the dim light ahead. "There. It may have a parking garage as well."

Nodding, Marc turned down the narrow, cobbled street, off the slightly wider main road. The building did have a steep ramp leading under the raised first floor, and he eased the truck onto the pavement, clamping his teeth together as he felt the tyres slip a little on the slick icy ground.

"_Merde_."

Adrian nodded, watching the sides of the opening as they half-slid down the ramp, the headlights showing the interior to be mostly empty. Getting out again would be more difficult, he thought, turning to watch Christophe manoeuvre the small truck down the incline and follow them to the far wall, but they could shovel the ramp clear and they had bags of salt to use on the snow and ice if it became necessary.

Under the parking level, an older and deeper stone-lined cellar provided a draught-and-damp free space to set up a camp, the old-fashioned coal furnace on one side of the cellar a huge bonus with its capacious oven and several tons of coal spilled down from the street-level chute beside it.

"No signal," Christophe said, his face lit brightly by the screen in his hand.

"Not surprising," Marc commented as he finished the bowl of hot, reconstituted soup.

"No."

Adrian looked around the warm, dry area. "Can we risk single watches tonight, Marc? The night is not appealing, even to monsters?"

"_Oui_," the hunter said, glancing at his watch. It was just past eleven. "Wake Christophe at one, and I'll take three to dawn." He yawned widely. "We'll be shovelling, I think, in the morning."

Crawling into the down-filled sleeping bag, he moved around until he found a moderately comfortable place for his shoulder. It was early for such a big storm, he thought vaguely as sleep tugged at him. Frosts and occasional snowfalls were common, but the big blizzards usually came late in December and kept coming through the early months of the new year. Two years, now, the weather had delivered such storms before Christmas. Something about that snagged his attention but he couldn't think what it was and the cumulative effects of the day, the effort of driving through the icy countryside, over cracked and falling-apart roads as the weather had worsened, made his ability to concentrate futile.

* * *

><p>The silence woke him. It wasn't silent, he realised a moment later. The furnace was still roaring softly, he could hear the faint gurgling from the water rushing through the pipes and the drip of a leak somewhere down the other end of the long basement. He couldn't hear anything else. But he could smell something in the warm, dry air.<p>

Opening his eyes, Marc waited for them to adjust to the soft red light of the glowing furnace, his heart pounding against his ribs. He couldn't hear Adrian and Christophe. Couldn't hear their breathing or any movement at all. A shiver threatened to lock his muscles and he dragged in a deep, quiet breath through his nose, willing himself to move.

Rotting flowers and rotting meat.

Cold fingers settled against his face, and a breathless chuckle brushed over his ear.

"Don't look."

He looked anyway.

Adrian lay a few feet away, four indistinct figures crouched around him. Marc could see the young hunter's feet, twitching and jerking against the floor.

"No."

"Oh, yes, we all have to survive," the whispering voice said against his cheek and he felt cold lips move down his neck. A sharp, bright pain and he rolled hard to the side, going nowhere. The vampire's vice-grip held him tightly to the floor and his eyes closed as he felt his pulse increase, pumping his blood into the mouth of the creature.

Lassitude spread through his limbs, and with the creeping fatigue, a dissociation from what he was doing, what he had been ordered to do, even from who he was. He could feel the suction. He could feel the talons in his flesh. He couldn't think.

The vampire lifted his mouth and a shiver rippled through the hunter's body, the air cold on the skin, despite the trickle of warm liquid he could feel spilling out.

"You are not dying," the voice said to him and he opened his eyes.

Above him, the flat gleam of dark skin was a contrast to the cool pale eyes that were watching him. Fleshy lips shone with blood, and the vampire's tongue delicately flicked over them, removing every last drop.

"You will deliver a message for me," the creature continued, his eyes intense and hypnotic. "To a man called Winchester, the one who was almost mine."

Dean, Marc thought vaguely. His heart beat slowly in his chest, his thoughts were scattered and diaphanous.

"The fallen ones had a reason for making the doppelgängers. A reason that is still applicable, and she is still the one they seek. It was in the oldest of all the church texts, that reason."

"Wha-? Wha' reason?" he slurred at the creature, struggling to make sense of what it'd said.

"Remember there was a reason for it, and that Winchester needs to know that they will not stop."

The weight was gone, the vampire vanished. Marc lifted his head, fighting against the heaviness of his body. Adrian lay unmoving, his skin reddened by the dim red light from the furnace. He heard a rustle behind him and saw Christophe sit up in the corner of his eye, heard the young man's sharp expletive as he rolled to his feet and ran to his friend.

_A reason_. Marc's brows drew together as he tried to memorise the conversation, tried to understand the meaning of what the vampire had told him, had left him alive to pass on.

"Marc!" Christophe hissed, dropping to his knees beside him, one hand lifting and turning his head gently. "How much did it take?"

"Not much," Marc said softly. "Get a dressing."

Adrian had been drained completely. He didn't need to see the shock on Christophe's face to know that. Four of them had been on the young man. _We all need to survive_, the vampire had said. But it hadn't taken him and they'd left Christophe completely alone. The message was more important than his fledglings survival, he thought dazedly. He wasn't sure how he was going to be able to pass it on.

* * *

><p><em><strong>West Keep, Kansas<strong>_

"Dean," Rufus called out, hurrying around the desk and sticking his head out of the office doorway as he caught of sight of the younger man striding past. "Jerome just called, they can't get in touch with the Qaddiysh."

Dean looked at him for a moment, then nodded, turning back to the hall and continuing on more slowly toward the communal living areas of the keep. He'd known he'd have to call on the angel for help, it was inevitable, he thought bitterly. Cas was hamstrung by the apparent bureaucracy that existed in the tiers above him, but he was, after all, an angel, and still he hadn't managed to be all that helpful over the last few years.

Just a few days off was all he wanted. Time to fix his car, time to let his head settle and think through what it was he could do. Time to get his shit straightened out. But no. For a second, John McClane's gravelly voice echoed in his head and he smiled automatically at the remembered acerbic comment. Hollywood's idea of disaster was too fucking small. A few terrorists trying to blow up a building? No problem. Dozens of mooks attempting to wipe humanity from the face of the planet was what he had to contend with.

Turning at the main stairs, he started up them, resolutely not looking at the fourth-floor landing and continuing up to the narrow stairs that gave access to the flat, partially walled roof of the keep.

* * *

><p>The storm had gone, swept to the south with a raw northerly wind that blew straight down from the arctic snowfields of Canada. He shivered and shifted to the shelter of the higher walls, dragging the edges of his coat closer together and pulling up the collar to stop the icy flow from blasting down his neck and robbing him of every last bit of body heat he had.<p>

"Castiel," he said softly, eyes closed and head bowed as he focussed on the angel's face. Jimmy's face, really. "Cas, we got some bad news. Need you to warn your brothers over in Jordan, Camael's gonna be gunnin' for them." He opened an eye and looked around expectantly, seeing only the windswept icy stone. "Cas?"

"How do you know what Camael's doing?"

The angel's voice, to his right and slightly behind him, made him jump and he turned and gave Cas a dark look, taking a step back at the same time.

"Your missing scribe turned up here yesterday," he told Castiel, jerking a thumb in the vague direction of the order.

"Metatron? Is here?" Cas' eyes widened dramatically, his expression astonished. "Are you sure?"

"Well, I didn't card him, but yeah, he seemed to know the right stuff," Dean answered defensively.

"I must see him."

"Yeah, uh, no. What you _must_ do right now is go warn your buddies in the desert that there's an archangel coming for them," Dean countered tightly. "Apparently, torture is the only way Camael's gonna get the info he needs now about the missing tablets."

He watched the angel's face contort slightly at the dilemma of the conflicting tasks. Suck it up, he thought dryly. The feeling relented a little as he saw the genuine confusion underlying it. Dumb-ass angel had never really gotten the hang of making the right choice at the right time.

"Metatron doesn't seem to be interested in going anywhere soon," he told the angel. "You got time to make sure the _Irin_ are forewarned."

"Yes," Cas said, nodding in agreement. "You're right, of course. I need to warn them."

Dean leaned back against the wall, feeling the cold radiating from the stone even through his coat, waiting for the flutter of wings. Cas remained there, a few feet from him, his gaze on the ground.

"I could use your help," the angel said finally, risking a sideways look at the hunter. "To warn the Qaddiysh, to seek out the angel tablet."

Dean shrugged. "I'm busy."

"Dean, I'm sorry –" Cas took a step closer to him and he looked away.

"I know," he said shortly. "You're sorry you weren't around. I'm sorry you weren't around. I'm sorry I wasn't around. We're all fucking sorry for the cluster-fuck and it doesn't change a goddamned thing, so let's – drop it, alright?"

"Of course."

"Go save your buddies."

The flutter of wings echoed off the stone and Dean turned for the door, pulling in a deep breath of the ice-cold air as he wrenched it open and went inside. Still being manipulated, he thought to himself, walking down the stairs. Still being pushed and pulled into place. Still no idea of who or what was behind that.

He came onto the fourth-floor landing and stopped, staring down the hall. Make time, Sam'd said. His stomach was fluttering with indecision. With that thundery, shivery feeling, back again. He started down the hall, slowly at first, gaining speed as he got closer to the apartment door.

When he reached it, the indecision was worse. He was standing there without a single solid reason to be there. And he wasn't sure yet, in his own mind, if it was a selfish desire, what he wanted. If she wouldn't be a lot better off without him and far from the way things got so screwed up around him.

He knocked on the door, looking at his closed hand in slight astonishment. He hadn't exactly meant to do that.

It opened, and he lowered his hand quickly, arranging his features into an expression something less confrontational as Alex looked up at him.

"Hey, I was – uh," he said, casting around furiously for an excuse to be standing here. Something about her was different, yet it was familiar at the same time and the contradiction had wiped out everything else. Jerome's words came back to him and he grimaced inwardly, knowing he was going to use the request, even though he still didn't think it was a good idea. "I – uh, wanted to ask you something."

She stepped back, holding the door for him and he walked past, wiping his hands against the outside of his coat and stopping at the wide arch that led into the living room.

The apartment was almost as it had been. Books were shelved neatly, her coats hung on the rack with scarves hanging over them, an open book sat on the small table next to the armchair to one side of the hearth and the mismatched china was stacked on the shelves in the kitchen, a couple of bowls of dried flower petals adding a faint and subtle hint of scent to the warm, dry air.

"You, um, really got this place fixed up fast," he said, looking at her as she walked up to him.

"I don't like to be disorganised," she said, by way of explanation, and he smiled at that. "I just made a pot of coffee," she added as she walked past to the kitchen. "Do you want a cup?"

"That'd be – yeah, thanks, that'd be good," he said, looking around more carefully as he walked through the neat room to the table.

"You cut your hair," he said, pulling out a chair and sitting down, recognising the difference as she turned back to him, the warm overhead light catching the different tones in the curls and reminding him of Chitaqua.

"Yeah," she said, bringing a cup to the table and setting it in front of him. "Renee said it was short when she met me, and I thought it might jog something loose, if I saw it that way in the mirror again." She carried her own mug and set it down, sitting opposite him. "Kind of a long shot, but long shots are all I've got left."

The shadows in her face were still pronounced, he thought, watching her as she looked down and lifted her cup. She didn't look as young as she had then. Practical, a little withdrawn but still naïve, she'd been back then.

"So what did you want to ask?" She looked at him, catching him studying her and he looked away with deliberate casualness, picking up his cup and sipping the hot black liquid.

"About what?"

"You said you had something to ask?"

He blinked, and remembered. "Right, yeah. Uh, Jerome asked if you'd be interested in going and working with the order, helping to get Chuck's transcriptions sorted out, that kind of thing."

"I'm sorry." Her gaze cut away. "Is Jerome the guy in the library?"

"Yeah," he said, wincing inwardly at the slip. "The order, he's the, uh, last legacy there."

"What does he think I can do?"

"Well, before – uh, before, you were helping to transcribe Chuck's visions and what he was reading," he stumbled over the explanation, not really having gone into those details with the scholar. He had no idea of what Jerome wanted her to do there. "I think he thinks that you might good with picking up details, or organising the information …"

"Do you think I would?"

The question stopped him momentarily. "Yeah, I know you would."

"But you don't seem to approve of the idea much?"

He looked down at the cup on the table. "I don't know that it's such a good idea for you to be over there, with, you know, what you've got to deal with here. Right now, I mean."

"What's wrong?" she asked, and that felt familiar, that straight cutting through his bullshit and just asking. That felt familiar enough to bite.

He chewed on the corner of his lip. "If you could make a choice –"

A cry came from the bedroom and Alex got up automatically, glancing back as she walked around the table. "I won't be a minute, they just need a feed."

He half-rose from the chair as she disappeared into the hallway, wondering if he should be offering to help, or if she'd wanted help, if she would've asked. He sank down again as he heard her footsteps in the hall, watching as she came around the corner of the doorway with James in her arms.

"He always wakes first," she said, sitting down in the armchair close to the fire. "And he's always starving, so we'll deal with that first."

Dean looked away as she unbuttoned her sweater, lifting the child to her breast. Way too much, he thought, too close, too intimate, too intense. Nearly every woman in the keeps – and the camps – was breastfeeding now, and he barely noticed it anymore, with anyone else. But here … and now … his pulse was hammering in his throat and he looked down at the cup of coffee, picking it up and swallowing a mouthful.

"Sorry, if I could make a choice about what?" she asked him and it was several seconds before he could think what she meant.

"Uh, you know what? You're busy, and I should probably go," he said, standing and draining the rest of the coffee in one long mouthful.

"Are you afraid of them, or me?" she asked him, her voice still low but a little harder. "Because it looks like you're running."

He leaned against the table edge then turned to look at her. "I don't know," he said, licking the dryness from his lips.

"You said you wanted to be here for them," she said, one brow lifting very slightly. "This is it, you know, this is what it's like."

"Yeah, I know."

There was a second cry from the bedroom and he glanced that way nervously. She was right, he thought, looking back at Alex as the tension ran out of him abruptly. "Alright. What do I do?"

She smiled at him, and for a long moment it was the smile he remembered, the one he'd wanted to see, her eyes filled with a warmth that seemed to reach into and right through him, seeing him as he was.

"Can you get her up? She doesn't mind being changed first," she said, and the smile lifted a little higher on one side as she saw him absorb that. "Don't worry, I'll walk you through it."

* * *

><p>"Wasn't so hard," he said consideringly an hour later, settling James back into the cot and tucking the blanket around him.<p>

"Sssh," Alex told him, backing out of the room. He followed her out, closing the door silently behind them.

"You enjoyed that," he accused her as they walked back to the living room.

"Watching you sweat and drop dirty diapers onto the floor in a panic attack?" she asked him softly. "Not so much."

He grinned a little at the memory, the grin fading as she picked up the pots of cream and set them back on the shelves.

"Thanks."

She turned to look at him, one cheek lifting a little. "For what?"

"For not letting me run," he said, dragging in a deep breath. "You were right, I wanted to. It felt, I don't know … too soon. Too much."

"You didn't want to," she contradicted him gently. "You didn't think you could handle it."

"That too."

"Why?"

He turned away, unsure of how to answer that. He could feel her gaze on him.

"Before the great baby-changing adventure, you asked me about having a choice," she said, letting him off the hook and turning to the kitchen.

Dean shook his head slightly, grabbing hold of the opportunity to buy a little more time. "That's what you're gonna call it? The great baby-changing adventure?"

She glanced back at him. "Yep, to everyone I talk to from now on, that'll be what I'm calling it," she said disparagingly, eyeing him in frustration. "Stop changing the subject."

The familiarity of the moment, her expression and the words and the way it'd been, caught in his throat, and he took an involuntary step closer to her. Then it was gone, fragmenting before he could even say what he'd wanted, dissolving as he saw her expression change, become concerned at what she could see in his face.

"I –" He looked away, dropping his gaze and shaking his head. "Some other time."

Clearing his throat, he looked back at her and gestured at the hall. "I'm not here all the time, but can I, uh –?"

"Whenever you want to," she answered immediately.

"Good," he said. That was familiar too, he thought unhappily. She wouldn't push at the change in him, she never had, always waiting for him to say something, for him to want to say something. _I do_, he said silently to her as he turned away and walked to the apartment's front door. But he couldn't. Despite those flashes of deeply wanted familiarity, she didn't know him and wanting what they'd had felt like living without skin.

Opening the door and stepping out into the hall, he thought about all the things she didn't know. The worst stuff had come out involuntarily before, a reaction to what had happened to the camps, a build-up he couldn't bury or deflect that had spilled over her and left him with a different perspective, and someone to trust. Turning, he closed door quietly behind him, forehead leaning against the wood for a second. He couldn't do it again, not deliberately.

* * *

><p>Dean watched the slight woman pull off the down parka and knitted cap and unwind the long, thick scarf from her neck, dumping the damp clothing onto the back of a chair and pushing ineffectively at the flattened dark curls of her hair as she drew in a breath.<p>

"How many?" Rufus asked, passing her a glass and waiting for her to toss it back before he refilled it.

"A hundred and seventy-four," Tilly answered him, carrying the topped-up glass to the fire, and standing in front of the warmth, the hectic red spots on her cheeks slowly subsiding. "They were all together, in the basement of some fat cat's country place outside of Shoshone."

"Good job getting them back," Dean remarked, leaning back against the desk.

Tilly shook her head. "That wasn't the problem," she said, looking behind her and perching on the arm of the chair there. "We came back through Wyoming, along the North Platte River, trying to follow what used to be the 26. Just past Fort Laramie, there was – something – on the river."

"Something?" Rufus glanced at Dean, one brow cocked. "Something like what?"

"Ice, it was a block of ice," she said, with a helpless shrug. "I don't even know how to describe it, really."

"A block of ice," Rufus repeated doubtfully. "You mean the river was frozen there?"

"No," Tilly said, rubbing her hands over her face as she tried to gather her thoughts and describe exactly what they'd seen. "On the western side, the river had banked up, but on the eastern side, it was dry," she said slowly. "It was about fifty foot high, perhaps a hundred feet long and the same in width, across the whole river depression." She saw their expressions change as they looked at each other and smiled humourlessly. "We saw it from three miles away, glittering in the sunshine. When we got there, it was like – oh, I don't know even know what it was like. Inside, there were frozen animals, a herd of deer, I think."

"Okay, give me a second," Rufus said, closing his eyes and trying to envisage what she'd described. "So … something … snap froze the river and a herd of deer and turned them into a fucking great block of ice? That about right?"

"That's about it," she agreed tiredly. "Everyone saw it, Rufus, you don't have to take my word on it."

Dean looked at the other hunter. "Something the angels did?"

"Maybe, although I can't see why – or how," Rufus said, looking back at Tilly.

"The ice was melting, but slowly," she continued, her gaze dropping to the glass in her hands. "And there were wolves, hundreds of them, and coyotes, even a couple of black bears, just hanging around the edges." She looked up at him, her mouth twisting up a little. "They looked like they were waiting for it to thaw out, to get to the deer that were inside it."

"That's … creepy," Dean said, straightening up and walking around the desk. "When was that?"

"Four days ago," she said.

"Just before the storm hit us," Rufus said. "Did it pass over you?"

"No, we were further to the west," she told him. "We got a night where the mercury dropped a lot, it was down to minus thirty eight, but no storm."

"A weather aberration?"

Rufus glanced at him and shook his head. "I don't know."

"The other thing was as we came past Scottsbluff," Tilly said.

"Oh, there's more?" Dean said, mostly to himself. "Awesome."

"We saw tracks in the snow the next morning," Tilly continued, looking at Rufus. "Long, narrow-footed tracks with protruding claws. Two sets."

He frowned at her. "Werewolves?"

She shook her head. "No, I've only ever seen tracks like these in northern Minnesota."

"Spit it out, Tilly," Dean said impatiently. "There's not much in Minnesota but –"

She nodded. "Wendigo."

"In Nebraska? Come on," Rufus said, feeling an icy chill slide down his neck.

"The winters have been getting harder," she said, lifting her glass and tipping it back, grateful for the fire down her throat and warming her belly. "Maybe they're moving south, trying to find people?"

"Two of them?" Dean shook his head. "They don't hunt together."

"These were together, and I'm pretty sure they were watching us," she contradicted him quietly. "I don't know why they didn't attack us when we went through, there were a lot of us and we were scattered a bit, trying to find a road that would take the vehicles."

"Dammit," Dean said with feeling, turning away from them. "Well, we'll have to go and check it out now."

Rufus sighed his agreement. "They'll follow the tracks, lead 'em straight here."

"I'll take Vince," Dean said abruptly. "Who else is free?"

"Adam and Christine are off the rosters," Rufus said, thinking of the schedules he and Bobby had worked out while Dean and Sam had been hunting the wraiths. "We sent Elias and Billy over to Tawas, with the trainees. Lee's been training and Jack and Joseph are both over at Ghost Valley –"

"How's Adam?"

Rufus looked at him. "He's fit."

"What about Chris' kids, what's the story with that?" Dean asked, not wanting anyone whose mind wasn't a hundred percent on the job. Wendigo were too damned hard.

"She gave them up," Rufus told him. "Family at Lightning Oak."

Dean sighed. "She okay with that?"

"Seemed to me," Rufus said with a slight shrug. "You could talk to her about it."

"Alright," Dean said, ignoring the last comment. "We'll take the deuce."

He walked around the desk, and Rufus watched him leave the office.

"He seemed … less than impressed," Tilly said, putting her glass down and standing.

"Yeah, well, can't always get what we want," Rufus said absently. "Good job on the survivors. I'll need you to get over to the order, get Jerome to pass on what you saw on the river to the other chapters and see if Michel caught anything that might've caused that on the data from the satellites."

"Sure," Tilly agreed. "We did luck out with the survivors, got two more doctors and a dentist."

Rufus snorted softly. "That'll go down a treat."

* * *

><p><em><strong>November 22, 2013. Talifah, Jordan<strong>_

Sunshine glittered and speared from the spills of fine sand that marked the edge of the ravine, but the temperature dropped in the deep shade between the upright walls of rock.

Castiel stared at the great doors, pulled from the recessed pintles in the stone façade and thrown aside, crumpled and fractured. _Too late_. The words beat in time with his pulse, with the low hiss of sand over the empty steps, with the soft moan of the wind through the filigreed carvings of the columns.

Shamsiel, and his son, Lazio, lay to his left, both angel and nephilim staring sightlessly at the desert sky, the depredations of the birds already apparent in gaping wounds. He was afraid to go inside the temple, afraid to see else lay there in the dust-filled silence.

_Too late._

The soft flutter of wings at the end of the canyon spun him around without volition or thought, his sword drawn and raised, tightly gripped in one hand as he stared at his brother.

Black wings folded back behind Gabriel's armour as he shook his head and walked slowly to the doorway.

"Just me, little brother," Gabriel said quietly, glancing down at the bodies as he passed them. "Are they all dead?"

"I don't know," Cas admitted, lowering the point of his sword but keeping it in his hand. "I haven't been inside."

Gabriel nodded understandingly. "I'll take point," he said, crossing to the steps and climbing. "Keep an eye on whatever might be behind us."

Cas nodded obediently and followed him.

In the dim golden light of the huge hall, the hangings had been torn down and rent, lying in pieces on the stone floor. Gabriel moved to the open doors and entered the library. What had been the library, Cas thought, his gaze taking in the utter destruction. Books and scrolls and manuscripts and notes had been torn and scattered across the great room, tables and shelving knocked over and broken, the ancient, thickened glass from the skylight that had let gentle, coloured light in lay smashed and ground to powder, sparkling like diamond dust over every surface.

"He was thorough," Gabriel remarked softly, picking his way slowly through the detritus of the attack. He stopped abruptly and Castiel followed his gaze to the floor between two towering shelves. Araquiel lay there, dried blood staining his chest and robes and the floor around him the colour of rust from the deep cut that had almost severed his head. His chest had been bared, the bones of the ribcage pulled outward.

They found Penemue and the nephilim in the next room, a charred circle around them, the walls and floor and vaulted ceiling scorched and blackened.

"Camael did not do this alone," Gabriel said, his eyes narrowed as he looked at the char patterns of the flames over the walls. Castiel stepped closer.

"No," he agreed, walking around the edge of the circle. "They were within a circle of holy fire, but the fire turned inward, onto them."

The sound was tiny, a thin scrape but both angels turned together, swords lifting as they stared at the pile of broken corpses inside the black circle.

"Who is there?" Gabriel lifted a hand and the dead rolled away, toppling from the pile and hitting the floor with heavy thumps.

Castiel stepped across the charred line cautiously, pulling the bodies in the centre of the heap aside. He reached out, then turned to look back over his shoulder at Gabriel, eyes wide.

"One lives."

Gabriel scowled as he stepped into the circle and picked his way across to the seraph. Under Castiel's hand, he saw the beating heart in the centre of the torn chest, the woman's eyes milky white and staring up at him sightlessly.

"Araquiel's daughter," Castiel said softly. "Reuma. Can you heal her?"

The Angel of Death knelt beside him, and Cas moved aside, out from under the great black wings that lifted and curved around to enclose the woman.

Light flowed from the archangel, dim at first, and brightening gently, until every feather was rimed in silver and the shadows were banished completely from the gloomy room. He heard a ragged gasp from beneath the wings as the light died away.

"What happened here?" Gabriel asked, sitting back on his heels as his wings folded back.

Reuma looked down at her chest, fingers stroking the smooth, unbroken skin wonderingly. She lifted her head.

"Camael came in the morning, with two men," she said, glancing at Castiel and looking back at Gabriel. "He killed Shamsiel and Lazio outside as they fought him. Then everyone else. He was screaming about the tablets."

"Did he get the locations?" Cas looked down at her.

"He killed the keeper of the Dark Mother's tablet months ago," she said, shaking her head. "Sariel and Amaros fled into the desert, I do not know if he caught them or not. We didn't expect him to come here, the texts of Heaven were clear on the Word."

"What do you mean?" Gabriel stared at her. "All the tablets must be brought together."

"But only one can wield that power, even if all are present," Cas said slowly, looking down at Reuma, a memory as clear as a snapshot in his mind.

She nodded. "Even so, it was known to us, from our studies of the scribe's original works. He will not find the angel tablet, even if he can get the location from Amaros. And if he does, they will be as stones to him, no more."

Gabriel looked suspiciously at Cas. "You knew this?"

"Not until yesterday," Castiel said. "I searched in the library, once it had been cleaned. Like most of Metatron's works, the answers were there, but not easily found. The nature of the tablets, the nature of the one who can touch them, were woven into another tale."

"Who is the one who can wield the power?" Gabriel looked back at Reuma, frowning as memory tickled him as well. "You speak of the story of the Sentinel?"

"Camael thinks it's the last living descendant of the bloodline of the Lamb," Reuma said, nodding. "But that's not right."

"Then why would he think it?"

"Because that's the way it was suggested on the tablets and the prophecies, the blood of the living scion would be the key to the power." She looked at Castiel. "In what he later added, the blood of the scion is a possible key only. It wasn't any one thing in particular that chose the Sentinel."

Gabriel looked at her, baffled. "So there are two possibilities. Does Camael know the location of either?"

She shook her head as he got to his feet and reached out to pull her to hers. "They didn't say anything further about it, not even how to tell the correct one. As with the prophet's abilities, I think the choice will only be made when the time is right, when the tablets are together."

"We have to find Sariel and Amaros." Castiel began to pick his way out of the circle.

"They are hidden from everyone now," Reuma warned him. "If they escaped Camael and his sorcerers, we will not be able to see them or feel them and they will keep themselves hidden."

"Oh, Michael's gonna love this," Gabriel muttered, looking over the nephilim's head to Cas. "You'll have to take her somewhere safe – safer – and hide her well. I'll tell our lord and commander."

The layers of paper and dust swirled up into the air and settled down again slowly as the fading echoes of beating wings dissipated in the room.

* * *

><p><em><strong>November 26, 2013. Stonegate Road, Minatare, Nebraska<strong>_

"I see what Tilly meant about the road," Vince grumbled as the truck hit another slab of heaved-up paving and lurched to one side, the three passengers scrabbling for better hand-holds and Dean's mouth thinning as he fought gravity and got it back on all six tyres.

"What road?" Adam agreed, bracing himself between the dash and door to keep from squashing the woman seated between them.

In the last two years of destruction and rejuvenation, the farmland and open plains that had been characteristic of the area had disappeared, overtaken by rapidly-growing woodlands that pressed close to the edge of the concrete or asphalt highways and sent their roots deep under them.

It was, Dean considered unhappily, good country for all manner of monsters these days. The dark and thick new forests were joining up, providing sheltered paths across the country in which anything could hide, and the only buildings that had survived the apocalyptic signs and the breaking of the seals were the oldest, of stone and brick, built solidly with their foundations deep in the earth and inevitably, some thing living down in the lined or dirt cellars and basements.

Tilly had seen the tracks south of the Minatare reserve, he remembered, slowing down. That was around here.

"So we're just playing tethered-goat?" Vince asked him as the truck came to a halt.

"You want to hump our gear around the forest and go looking for them, be my guest," Dean told him absently, looking around the relatively straight section of still-intact asphalt. It was lightly dusted in snow, more mantling the trees to either side.

"Pass."

"Yeah, me either."

He got out of the truck and walked across the road. Almost hidden by the encroaching trees, the ruins of a building stood close to the edge of the road. One wall remained, mortared stone and brick still held firm by two lower internal walls. It was high enough that they couldn't be taken by surprise from behind, he thought. It would make the only point of approach from the front, past the lower mounds of tumbled stone.

They had flame-throwers and flare guns, and a couple of bags of magnesium flares. A hit from either would do the job. _If they came_. Shaking off the doubt impatiently, he turned back to the truck, and walked around to the rear, unzipping the canvas flap. He heard the doors open and the others get out as he climbed in over the tail gate and began to load the black canvas bags with the flares and guns.

* * *

><p><em>I won't be around all the time<em>. And that was the disclaimer of the year, wasn't it, Dean thought, staring at the small fire in front of him, the light flickering over the scabby-looking, moss-coated stone walls around him.

Rolled in their sleeping bags in the corners between the shorter walls and the high rear wall, Adam and Christine were sleeping. Beyond the light of the fire, Vince was sitting with his back to one of the shorter walls, watching the darkness.

There was too much going on. _There would always be too much going on_, he amended to himself irritably, leaning forward and tossing another branch onto the desultory flames that were all that could be coaxed from the damp wood.

The memory of her, standing hipshot and joking dryly, hit him again and he sucked in a breath. He'd come very close to going to her in that moment, the need to touch her, hold her, built out of that second of familiar and wanted easiness between them. Even the memory had the power to shake him, he thought, fists balling up. But it wasn't real, hadn't been real at the time, just a flash, just a second of what had been, might be, could've been and he was kidding himself thinking it would come back that fast, that easily. And he might be kidding himself that it was what was best for her, best for their kids.

The soft, moist snap of a branch brought him out of his thoughts instantly, and he saw Vince's head turn fractionally from the corner of his eye. Moving his hand, he felt the boxy shape of the flare gun beside him. The slurring hiss of snow falling from the needles of a pine on the other side of the building confirmed what he already knew. It – _or they_ – were here.

"Vince, get closer," he muttered, rolling onto one knee and staring unfocussed into the night. He would have a better chance of picking up the movement of the creatures peripherally than he would seeing them straight on.

The flames shivered at the movement of air and Dean felt rather than saw the shadow that passed between the fire and the wall.

"Vince?" He got to his feet and the flashlight beam bounced out, sweeping the empty space where the hunter had been. "Fuck!"

Dumping the rest of the branches onto the fire, Dean spun around, his foot hitting Adam's in the bag. "Up! Now! It's got Vince."

* * *

><p>In less than a minute, they were running from the building, tracking the heavy prints into the forest. Christine and Adam were a step or two behind him, a step or two wide of him, flame-throwers on their backs, the long, slightly bent nozzles swinging from side to side as they followed him along the double-trail. Ahead a harsh scream split the darkness, ending in a bubbling groan as Dean increased his speed.<p>

The soft whoompf of the flame to his left made him stumble slightly right, and he saw the creature, tall and grey-skinned, reddish eyes squinting and its howl of surprise drowned out in the sudden roar of the throwers. The sagging and pocked flesh burst into flame, the end of the tongues of fire igniting it, and the howl rose in pitch shockingly as it flailed the air and staggered into a tree, a white-and-yellow inferno engulfing it, catching even the snow-covered needles of the pine.

"Come on, leave it!" he yelled, flashlight picking up the single tracks, deeply imprinted with the weight the monster was carrying. He shot along the trail, hearing the thud of boots behind him.

He caught sight of the edge just as his momentum carried him over it, cartwheeling through the air and landing in the deep cellar on his back, the wind driven from his lungs, his attempt at a shouted warning nothing more than a wheezing gasp. Christine skidded to an ungraceful stop on the lip of the stone foundations, her flashlight beam spiralling uselessly into the sky as she pinwheeled her arms to keep her balance. Adam saw it in time and stopped a few feet from her, his flashlight pointing straight down into the open and mostly water-filled pit.

"Dean, you okay?"

Rolling onto his side, Dean gritted his teeth as he tried to get a lungful of air. He'd hit something sharp, he could feel the deep ache on one side of his back, beneath the shoulder, but it wasn't going to slow him down.

"Yeah," he finally managed to say, lifting the flashlight and thumbing the switch once, off then on again.

"It's a foundation," Christine said unnecessarily, her light playing around the edges as she looked for a way down. The beam lit up a dark square, a few feet from Dean, and his eyes narrowed as he realised it was another staircase.

"Get down here," he grunted, pushing himself up and feeling the ache throb.

"Wait for us!" Adam shouted at him, hurrying behind Christine. "Don't –"

The rest of the youngest Winchester's words were lost as Dean started down the slippery, ice-coated steps. He wasn't going to wait, wasn't going to lose Vince.

* * *

><p>The flight of stairs ended abruptly in a small, low-ceilinged root cellar, damp earthen floor flooding his nose with scents that almost but didn't quite override a deeper smell of putrefaction, carried on a vagrant draught from the other side. Lit up by the flashlight's beam, he saw a tunnel, crudely dug in the braced, dirt wall.<p>

"Dean, wait for us!" Christine's voice sounded curiously distant, and he ignored the order, the flashlight held along the barrel of the flare gun as he walked toward the tunnel.

Descending a few feet more before dog-legging, he burst around the blind corner, finger tight on the trigger. The bright beam of the flashlight showed the burrow's contents with unmerciful clarity, the creature facing him covered in blood and holding the long, dripping entrails of the body at its feet in both clawed hands. The muscles in Dean's finger contracted hard and the wendigo exploded with light and flame as the flare buried itself inside the creature's chest. Twisting away, Dean threw his arm over his eyes as the piercing hot light flooded the space, searing into him. He stumbled backwards and got around the corner, dropping to his knees and automatically feeling for the flares in his coat pocket to reload, his vision shot. The monstrous hiss of the fire behind him filled the tunnel, the wendigo's screams dropping to indistinct, muffled noises as it burned and he crawled forward, toward cooler air, loading the flare gun and hoping nothing else was waiting for him because it'd take another few seconds before he could see again.

"Dean!"

He looked up and saw Adam running toward him, the beam of the flashlight hitting him in the face and wiping out everything else. Closing his eyes, the afterimage filled his mind – a flash of bright blonde behind Adam and behind that a shadow, impossibly tall.

"Look out!" he shouted, opening his eyes in time to see Christine disappear, flung backwards out of the tunnel. Dean scrambled to his feet, the flare gun cocked and aimed behind Adam. He saw his brother fall flat, fingers scrabbling in the dirt as he was whipped back along the tunnel, Dean's flashlight beam lighting up his face, blue-green eyes wide and mouth open, but showing nothing of the creature behind him.

"Son-of-a-BITCH!"

Racing after Adam, he tripped over Chris' fallen flame-thrower and catapulted into the root cellar as his brother shrieked in pain.

The flame-thrower tripping him was probably what had saved him from having his head taken off as he'd come through the tunnel's entrance, he thought later. He felt a sharp pain in his scalp as he ducked his head and rolled fast to one side, the gun in his hand lifting as the creature fell onto him, a blast of sickeningly foul air gusting over his face from its open mouth, and a deeper agony of knives punching into his side as it grabbed him.

Pulling the trigger of the flare gun, the barrel pressed hard against the wendigo's abdomen, the gun trapped between them, Dean whipped his head to the side, eyes screwing shut tightly as light exploded all around him. A conflagration of heat and noise and pain filled him, the certain knowledge that the creature would burn him as it went up filtering through the chaos of sensation, and his legs snapped up, boot soles flat against the flaming body and shoving it off, sending it flying backwards across the cellar. He winced at the raw sting of his crisped skin and the nauseating smell of burning flesh, fighting down the overload he could feel as his vision dwindled to a pinpoint of light. _Not now, too much to do_.

The burning monster lit up the small space and Dean rolled onto his side as his vision returned slowly, blurry at first then regaining focus. His hands and forearms, chest and knees had taken the worst of the burning, and he fell back as he tried to lever himself to his feet, the brightness of the pain almost greying out his sight for the second time in less than a minute.

* * *

><p>Christine lay near the staircase, out cold, he thought, looking at her. Closer to him, Adam was on his back, both hands clenched tight around the top of one thigh, blood pumping over them and soaking into the ground. Dean felt his stomach roll as he realised that most of the muscle had gone from the leg, the bones shining pinkly in the brilliant light.<p>

_Get up_, he told himself, ignoring the flashes of pain from scorched skin as he managed to get upright.

_Belt_.

He fumbled with the buckle one-handed, dragging at it impatiently and yanking it through the loops of his jeans. Crouching next to Adam, he slid the leather strap under his brother's leg, using his teeth to hold the buckle in place as he got the free end through and pulled.

"Hold on," he muttered past the obstruction in his mouth.

Tightening the belt, he waited until the blood flow slowed, seeing the massive rents more clearly as the light behind him began to slowly fade. The femoral artery had been severed, half-way down the thigh. The belt would stop Adam from bleeding out if he could get him home in time. Everything else had just been peeled away, sinew hanging limping, hamstring and the few tattered shreds of muscle still adhering to them unconnected to anything else. Adam's hands had fallen away and he saw that his bloodless face had slackened, shock to the body carrying his brother into unconsciousness.

_Blood loss. Shock. Infection_. Too many killers in the room today.

Pulling off his coat, Dean dragged off his shirt and tore off the sleeves, keeping his moans locked behind his teeth as the fabric rasped over the red, shiny skin of the burns. He wound the shirt over and around what was left of the leg and secured the wrapping with the sleeves, not wanting to think about how clean the shirt was. The fact was it was cleaner than the dirt floor and he wasn't going to be able to lift Adam on his own.

"Chris!" he said loudly as he finished tying the clumsy knots. "Christine!"

He lurched upright, picking up his coat and pulling it back on, feeling his balance dip and sway with the small change in altitude. Walking unsteadily over to her, he wondered if he was going to make it out at all. A lump was rising on the side of her head, but thumbing up the lids, he saw her pupils respond, neither larger than the other, and neither blown.

"Chris," he tried again, patting the side of her face lightly. She jerked back and opened her eyes, and he watched them focus on him, the memories of the last few minutes coming back.

"Come on, need your help," he said, grabbing her arm and pulling her to her feet. "You alright?"

"I think so," she said, looking around the rapidly-dimming room as the fire in the monster burned itself out. "What happened?"

"There were three of them," Dean said shortly, flipping his flashlight back on and moving to Adam's shoulders. "Last one came up the tunnel behind you and Adam."

She looked down at the blood-soaked shirt around Adam's leg. "God, is he alright?"

"No," Dean snapped, crouching down to grip his brother's shoulders. "We have to get out of here, pick up his legs."

She bent and took Adam's calves, tucked through her arms as they both lifted.

* * *

><p>The journey back up the stairs and across the water-filled open basement was slow and difficult. Dean moved backwards, feeling with his feet for stable footing as Christine directed him, the flashlight beams wavering and jerking over the half-collapsed foundation walls. The burns were on fire, and he could feel the skin splitting under the pressure, liquid trickling over his hands and soaking into Adam's coat.<p>

"Not much further," Christine said, the light picking out the narrow trail back to the road.

He nodded and dragged in another deep breath, looking down at Adam's face as they staggered through the undergrowth surrounding the ruins. _Just hold on_, he told his brother firmly. _We'll get you home_.

* * *

><p>The truck swerved to avoid another gaping fissure across half the width of the road and Dean flicked a look into the rear-view mirror, watching Christine brace herself and Adam in the back.<p>

"You alright?" he called out, and saw her nod.

"Better than bouncing, yeah, just go for it," she yelled back, keeping the saline drip above Adam and pulling the sleeping bag higher over him again.

There had been no time to either get Vince out or to burn him. Dean hoped that the wendigo's incineration might've taken care of the bodies in that hole, but he thought he'd need to go back, sometime, and make sure of it.

He kept his thoughts of the hunter locked down. It could've just as easily been him, or Adam or Christine that the first wendigo had taken, Vince had known the risks as well as anyone.

_Three of them_. That was unheard of, unknown in any hunter's experience. Created through near-starvation and isolation in very bad winters, he didn't know how long it took for the transformation from man to monster, only that they lived for hundreds of years, in either hibernation or feeding states, re-enacting their original choices over and over again. The Native American tribes, along the northern borders of Minnesota, had said that the men welcomed a spirit into them, an evil woodland spirit that drove them to eating the flesh of men until they were insane and incapable of eating anything else. It didn't matter if it was the work of a spirit or the men's own need to survive, he thought. They had always hunted alone, always guarded their wide-ranging territory fiercely.

_Too many bad winters in a row? Too few survivors from the ongoing decimations of the last five years? All of the above_, he asked himself derisively? He realised that neither he, nor anyone else he knew of, had the faintest idea of what the normal wendigo population might be. Rufus had let the Michigan camps know about it, and their defences were strong enough, provided everyone was inside them. Unlike the werewolves and to a lesser extent, the vampires, wendigo weren't governed by a nocturnal requirement, and the hunters would be going into the spreading forests to the north of the camps now, hunting game to eke out their supplies. He hoped that someone had thought to tell them to pack flares and flame-throwers.

* * *

><p><em><strong>November 28, 2013. West Keep<strong>_

Sam looked at his brother as they sat together on the hard, wooden settles outside of the medical rooms. Dean had his head in his hands, elbows resting on his knees, clothing still covered in Adam's blood but the burns dressed in clean, bulky dressings.

He wasn't sure if his brother was churning over some avenue of personal responsibility or just exhausted by the last forty-eight hours.

"You okay?" he asked, a little tentatively.

The noise from the depths of the bandages could've been a strangled laugh, or a snort of disbelief.

"Yeah, not so much, Sammy," Dean said, lifting his head and leaning back against the wall, his eyes closed.

"It wasn't your fault –"

He was surprised to see his brother shake his head as he cut him off. "I know that."

"You could get some rest?"

"Yeah." Dean opened his eyes, glancing at Sam's worried face and looking back at the closed door in front of them. "As soon as Adam's out of surgery, I'll do that."

"Dean, it could be hours, you heard what the doc said," Sam argued, straightening up slightly.

"Then it'll be hours," his brother countered mildly. "Leave it, okay?"

It was another two hours before the door opened and Bob walked out, his face drawn and pale with fatigue.

"He'll pull through," he said without preamble, looking at the two men as they got to their feet.

"What about his leg?" Dean asked, glancing behind the doctor at the door to the ward. "Did you save it?"

"Nothing left to save, Dean," Bob said. "You knew that."

Dean nodded. He had known it.

"He'll be okay though," Sam said, the emphasis making it a statement, not a question.

"Merrin's getting Rufus on a team to go over to St Louis. There was a good prosthetics lab there, and we'll find something for him. He'll be okay, I think." Bob sighed and turned away. "You two get some rest. Dean, I'll want to change those dressings in the morning and don't get them wet."

"Yeah."

They watched Malley return to the rooms and Sam looked back at his brother.

"You need a hand with a shower?"

This time the noise was perfectly understandable as a snort. "Wow, Sam, tempting … but no. I'll manage."

"You want to stay at the order tonight?" Sam asked, dropping into step with his brother as he headed down to the offices on the other side of the keep's main hall. "Metatron's been filling in a lot of gaps."

"Again – tempting … but no," Dean brushed him off and turned for the stairs as they came into the hall. "I'll come by in a while."

"You staying with Alex?" Sam's surprise bloomed in his voice and Dean stopped, looking back at him with a dry, one-sided smile.

"No, but I need to tell her about Vince. They were friends," he said, omitting what he really wanted from the visit. He thought Sam would probably understand the compulsion, the need to see them, make sure they were okay, that they were there, but he didn't feel a desire to admit to that need, not to anyone. "I'll see you later."

"Yeah," Sam said uncertainly, watching him turn away and climb the stairs. "Sure."

* * *

><p>He knocked at the apartment door, realising suddenly that at least that part had gotten easier.<p>

Alex opened it, her gaze flashing over him as she stepped back and he walked inside. She didn't say anything, and he felt a wave of relief. She'd never commented before, either, he remembered. Just left him to tell her what he could, when he could. The lack of pressure from her to explain, to justify, to put into words what he could barely cope with as emotions, it'd been a relief then. And it was now.

"Is Adam going to be alright?" she asked him as he stopped in the living room, and he realised that the hours he'd spent sitting in the corridor in the medical offices had probably been enough time for most of what had happened to have gotten around the keep, and probably further.

"Yeah," he said, looking down at her as she stopped next to him. "He'll lose the leg, but he'll live. Did you hear about Vince?"

She nodded, her gaze dropping. "Drew told me after you'd got in."

"I'm sorry," he said, wishing he could see her face, wishing he'd been here to tell her himself.

Turning away from him, Alex nodded again. "He was a friend. But that's what you do, isn't it? Risk your lives to protect the people here?"

Something else lay under the words but he couldn't quite see it. "Yeah, that's what we do."

"Have you eaten?" She gestured to the kitchen behind her. "There's, um, pot-roast and fresh bread?"

The abrupt change of subject bothered him as much as what he couldn't work out in the underlying tone of her voice.

"That's okay, I should find somewhere to crash for tonight, I wanted to let you know about Vince, should've realised the grape-vine would work faster than I could," he said in a rush, his gaze cutting away from her, not sure why he was pulling away when all he'd done on the way to and from Nebraska had been think about the moment they'd seemed closer.

"Of course."

He'd been expecting an argument, he realised, seeing that he wasn't going to get one. She stood beside the table, her arms crossed, looking slightly past him, toward the door.

Suddenly the situation reminded him of being suckered into a high-school game of Truth or Dare at the age of fifteen. It hadn't mattered which he'd chosen, it would've revealed something about him he didn't want revealed, couldn't bear to have revealed.

That flash of revelation shocked him. _How's she supposed to get to know you if you disappear every time something gets uncomfortable_, he asked himself scathingly. _That's all you're showing her, y'know, a coward who won't risk anything in case it doesn't work out_.

"Uh, actually, I could eat," he said, forcing the words out past the paper-dryness of his throat. "If it's no trouble?"

"No trouble," Alex said, flicking a swift glance at him before she turned to the kitchen. "Do you need help washing up?"

He looked down at his hands and arms, bundled in the thick dressings. "Doc said I was supposed to keep these on overnight," he told her, walking around the table and into the open kitchen area.

"Are they hurting?"

He hesitated about answering that, then nodded. "A little."

"Merrin gave me a bottle of painkillers, pretty strong ones," she said, looking over her shoulder at him. "They're in the bathroom, in the cupboard above the sink if you want to take one."

He watched her re-heating the roast, leaning against the table. "Might knock me out after a good meal," he warned her, very lightly.

She turned around then, her expression a little wry, a little puzzled. "Would that be so bad?"

The thought of sleeping here, even on the long sofa, snagged the breath in his throat. "I guess not," he said, swallowing past the obstruction.

* * *

><p><em><strong>Litteris Hominae, Kansas<strong>_

Chuck's hand flew over the paper and Sam took the pages, reading them slowly, trying to make sense of the less-legible words. Jerome had asked him to talk to Alex about coming back here. He wondered if she would remember how to decipher Chuck's appalling penmanship.

_It was like nothing they'd ever seen, a finger of spinning, roaring wind, drawn down from the frigid vacuum of space, and where it touched the earth, the silver-lit sand, it left ice in its wake, the cold unimaginable, snap-freezing all within several hundred yards of the terrible vortex._

_He caught the sword as the angel threw it with his last breath, and wrapped both fists tightly around it, and the metal glowed and burst into flames. Lifting the blade high above his head, they saw him incandesce from within, familiar features wiped away as he was filled from head to foot with molten light and power and a voice that was not a voice thundered above the roar of the whirlwind, above the screams of the dead, above the cries of the innocent, filling the world until they fell to their knees and hid their faces from the man who had become a star._

_That doesn't look good_, Sam thought, thrusting his fingers through his hair and pushing it back off his face. He looked at Chuck's face, wondering what had triggered the vision this time.

The prophet had stumbled out of his office two days ago and had been writing ever since, not a linear narrative but random scenes, in the arctic, which they thought might be related to the tablet buried there; in what seemed to be northern Europe, details of storms devastating whole swathes of countryside; scenes of a desert and the sand shifting and moving and the archangels in a fiery battle to the death.

Not one coherent starting point, he realised, passing the latest page to Marla and hearing her fingers hitting the keys.

In the corner of the room, in the deep wing-back armchair by the fire, he caught sight of Metatron, eyes hooded as he watched Chuck expressionlessly.


	5. Chapter 5 All Around Are Falling

**Chapter 5 All Around Are Falling**

* * *

><p><em><strong>November 29, 2013. Mackenzie, British Columbia<strong>_

A thin wind followed the winding curves of the river, and Kelly pulled the furs closer around his face as he felt the bite of ice in it. They'd managed to dodge a couple of storms, but the ever-decreasing temperatures were harder to avoid. Long periods of walking, particularly as they'd hit the ranges, had to be stopped as both Billy and Jack had sweated in their clothing, the liquid freezing solid when they'd slowed down and both needing a couple of night's rest and some careful application of lanolin to soothe the resulting abrasions.

The blink caught his attention as he turned to check the younger hunters following him, and he frowned, looking, seeing it again. He'd seen flashes like that before, but only ever at sea, reflecting from ice-bergs in the chill sunshine.

"Did you see that?" Billy took a stride closer to him, hand lifted to shade his eyes.

"Ice-blink," Kelly said shortly. "Come on, we'll get there by midday."

* * *

><p>Close to the huge block of ice, it was a lot colder.<p>

"What the hell did this?" Danielle said, her voice muffled through several layers over her nose, mouth and chin.

Even through the wavery and distorted ice, they could see the animals, frozen deep in the core. _Caribou_, Kelly thought. Caught by the river, moving too late in the season. What would hold up a herd this size, he wondered?

"Heads-up," Jack called from the bank of the river, twenty yards away and higher. "Wolves."

They turned and saw them, sitting, moving through the dappled light and shadow of the leafless forest, coats thick, in grey, black, white. Counting them, Kelly felt his chest contract a little.

"Jack, you see a direction where there aren't so many?"

"North-east, along the river bank," Jack confirmed. Under the prosaic tone, he could hear the thread of worry in the younger man's voice.

"We're going to walk that way, very quietly, but without dawdling," he told them, lifting his rifle from his shoulder and checking the magazine. "Rifles at the ready, semi-auto."

Turning, he walked along past the towering block of ice. It was melting where the sunlight touched it, refreezing in its own shadow, he noted. Jack walked down from the bank edge and Kelly felt Billy come up beside him, Danielle and Jack walking backward right behind them.

_There were at least a hundred wolves_. None of them moved as the party walked along the river's edge, although he felt their eyes on him.

"Ever seen a pack like that?" Billy asked him in a low voice.

"No," Kelly answered. His gaze scanned the river bank as they followed the curve, sticking to the shore-line rather than climbing the high bluff above them. "Never."

"They're not following," Jack said a moment later, slowing slightly to use the scope on his rifle to check their back trail.

"They were waiting for the ice to melt," Danielle said, frowning at the thought. "How could they know that it was full of meat?"

Kelly shrugged. He didn't know. He didn't want to know. Thinking about it was freaking him out.

"Let's get the fuck out of here, now."

* * *

><p><em><strong>West Keep, Kansas<strong>_

The smell of coffee, freshly ground, freshly made, filled his dream and he smiled slightly, rolling onto his shoulder, catching the faintest hint of a familiar scent as his cheek pushed into the soft cushion. He didn't want to wake up yet, but his hands and arms were burning, chasing away sleep with the insistence of pain, and he opened an eye reluctantly, looking at the bulky bandages that covered them, smelling the coffee, awareness of where he was coming back with a sledging kick.

Dean sat up, the soft, hand-knitted blanket sliding down off his shoulder as he looked around. Against the sunshine-drenched windows, he saw Alex turn at the bench, the pale golden shafts catching her curls and lighting them to honey and maple. The coffee pot burbled quietly and she reached up and took down two big cups.

The painkiller had done its job, he thought, leaning back against the sofa and closing his eyes. He hadn't woken once in the night, and even now the burns were hurting but not so much he couldn't ignore it for awhile longer. It would be a mistake to pretend that nothing had changed, he knew.

"When do you have to change the dressings?"

He opened his eyes and looked at her as she set a cup down in front of him and sat on the edge of the chair on the other side of the low table, hands curled around her cup.

"Today," he told her, leaning forward and picking up the cup. The coffee tasted as good as it'd smelled and he let out a small exhale. "Got some stuff from the order to put on them," he added, glancing toward the hall. He thought he'd dumped the canvas duffel there, meaning to pick it up on his way out. But he hadn't left.

"Do you need a hand?" She looked doubtfully at the dressings.

He almost said no, then realised if he did, he'd have to go and get Merrin to change them. He couldn't make a decent fist with the cracked skin on his palms.

"Yeah, if you don't mind."

He watched her nod and set her cup down on the table.

"No trouble."

_No dreams_, he thought as she got up and went down the hall to the bathroom. Could've been the painkiller. Could've been the familiarity of being here again, everything subtly scented with her. Could've been the two days of driving non-stop after two days chasing after the wendigo and being ready to drop when he'd gotten back, he thought with a derisive inner snort.

Rufus had already extracted a promise from him to go up to Michigan and see Boze and Jo about sending more kids to be trained. He'd agreed without thinking, knowing he couldn't work on the car. Looking around the comfortable room, he chewed on the corner of his lip. He didn't want to leave, now.

Alex came back into the room and set down a pile of sterilised dressing packs, saline solution in a deep bowl and a roll of non-stick gauze.

"Is it a cream? In your bag?"

He nodded, glancing to the hall. "I'll get it."

"Stay there," she said, walking around the sofa to the hall and picking up the duffel sitting by the door. She brought it back to the sofa and set it beside him. He felt a faint wash of relief that she was leaving it to him to find. The blood-soaked and filthy clothing and personal items in the bag weren't really things he needed her to know about him, not just yet. Pulling out the tub of thick, white ointment, he passed it to her, zipping the bag shut awkwardly.

As she unwound the open-weave bandages, Alex's attention was fixed on his hands and forearms and he watched her face. She didn't show much on the surface, keeping her thoughts and feelings hidden. He'd liked that about her, when they'd first met. She hadn't panicked and she'd considered what he'd said carefully, coming to her own conclusions about the viability of trying to remain at the camp alone.

The air hit the raw flesh and he blinked, looking down at the shiny red skin.

"This is going to hurt," Alex said apologetically. "Do you want something for that?"

He shook his head, looking back at her as she sluiced the wounds with the saline solution. It stung, but nothing he couldn't handle. The creamy unguent that Oliver had passed along was thick enough to smear but thin enough to not require much pressure and as she smoothed it over the burns, he realised he could barely feel her touch.

She wrapped the thin layers of gauze over the cream, and wound a clean, soft bandage around his left arm, glancing up at him as she fastened the elasticised clip to secure it over his elbow.

"Too tight? Or loose?"

"No, it's good." He moved the arm gingerly. The pain had been reduced to a faint sting, even with movement. Better than he'd hoped for.

The right arm went more quickly, and he looked at the tub of ointment. "Have to tell Oliver that stuff is good."

She smiled, screwing the lid back on and gathering up the old dressings and bandages. "Analgesic properties, the label says," she told him, getting up. "You're supposed to leave it on for a couple of days at least."

He nodded, turning his head as he heard a soft cry from the bedroom. "Just in time."

Walking from the kitchen to the hall, Alex huffed at his optimism. "You're off duty until you can close your hands properly."

The coffee in his cup had cooled and he picked it up carefully, carrying it to the kitchen and tipping it out, then pouring a fresh cup. He turned as he heard James' breathless squalling get louder.

"Is there anything I can do?" he asked, watching her settle into the chair with the baby and start to feed him. She looked up and nodded toward the bedroom.

"Could you keep an eye on Evie? She'll start crying if she realises she's alone," she said.

He nodded and walked out of the living room, turning down the hall and into the bedroom. It was a perfectly natural act, and one he'd seen enough of, but it was a lot easier if he didn't have to deal with the memories that came every time.

The curtains had been pulled back in the bedroom and the room was flooded with sunshine, the cot – that would be too small for both of them soon, he realised with a slight frown – speckled with moving colours from the glass mobile hung in front of the panes.

The infant's eyes were tracking the slow movements of the coloured shapes over the white cotton lining of the cot and he watched her, realising slowly that she hadn't registered his presence yet, her attention completely focussed on the colours.

Sam had been just six months old when they'd gone on the run. Not much older than the baby in front of him. Evelyn and James were almost four months now. His father had done most of the changing and feeding, and Sam had already been taking solids. It wasn't like he didn't have some experience of raising a kid, he thought, feeling a peculiar surge of self-mockery at the thought. He wanted it, he could admit to that, no matter how badly it scared him to want something that he wasn't sure he'd get.

Alex came into the room behind him, and he watched Evelyn's face as she caught sight of her mother, the huge blue eyes widening comically and chubby arms rising, hands clutching at the air like starfish as she made her soundless demand to be picked up.

"When do they start eating real food?" he asked her, following as she carried the baby into the living room.

"When I stop providing enough milk to satisfy them, Merrin told me." She set the child on the change mat on the sofa and changed the diaper, glancing up at him. "I'm not really all that maternal," she added. "It feels kind of weird, in some ways."

It was on the tip of his tongue to tell her that she'd spent a lot of time trying to avoid even the thought of having a family, and he swallowed the words down, still uncertain if that unwillingness to tell her about her past was for her – or for him.

"Yeah, well, totally dependent on you, that's gotta feel weird," he said instead, ducking his head to look at James as he felt her gaze shift back to him again.

"Merrin told me that I was really nervous, when I found out about them," she said, her voice flat and expressionless. "She told me about Jimmy and what had happened then."

Dean closed his eyes briefly. Should've known someone would tell her, that she might ask others. "I should have told you, I'm sorry."

Alex finished fastening the clean cloth diaper and tucked Evelyn back into the jumpsuit, lifting her to her shoulder and carrying her across to the armchair.

"I don't remember it," she said, as the baby's searching mouth found her nipple and started to suck, tucked comfortably into the crook of her arm. "It's just … words to me, like someone else's story, it doesn't come with a … personal connection."

"I thought –"

"At the moment, most of my life is just a big, empty blank, a few bits coloured in, here and there, but mostly just empty," she cut him off, lifting her head to look at him. "I would like someone I can trust, to help me fill it in, even if I can't feel it all yet."

He walked across the room and sat down in the chair opposite her, forcing himself to meet her eyes. "Alright, ask me," he said, hoping he would be able to answer. "Anything you want to know."

* * *

><p><em><strong>Litteris Hominae, Kansas<strong>_

The library had no windows. None of the rooms in the order's safehold did, the building set into the side of a hill and extending deep into the ground. The overhead lights lit the space in shades of gold and the fire was lit year-round, the soft crackle and hiss of the logs burning making a continuous background for the readers.

"When I finished the Word, I was instructed to give it to the _Irin we-Qaddesin_," Metatron said, leaning back in the armchair and looking at the men and women who were gathered around him, listening. "They were not cast down from Heaven, but requested by God to be teachers and to show his Creations the way."

"What way?" Katherine asked, her tone a little acerbic. "Christianity? Buddhism? Islam? Hindi? There are as many religions on this rock as there are races."

"That was unforeseen," Metatron said, inclining his head slightly in acknowledgement of her thinly-buried anger. "Originally, it was thought that the Qaddiysh and their children would be the teachers, spreading out to the corners of the world and sharing the knowledge, guiding humanity through its evolution. Unfortunately, that plan backfired when the Grigori re-settled after the First War, and started meddling."

"Meddling?" Felix looked at him. "That's a mild euphemism, considering that they were taking slaves and killing people and practising the most heinous of the black arts?"

The scribe looked at the fire for a moment. "They were, indeed, doing all of those of things," he agreed, his eyes distant with the memory of that time. "And God looked down and He was filled with wrath at their wickedness and the wickedness they were spreading to the humans around them, and He sent a Flood, to wash the land clean of their sins."

"It missed a few," Katherine said dryly.

Metatron nodded. "We believed that someone warned them, someone in the upper levels, but we never could find out who, or even if they were warned."

"It seems more likely now, doesn't it?" Sam stared at him narrowly. "You fled Heaven, around that time, didn't you?"

The angel smiled suddenly. "You doubt me, Sam? Knowing that I could never have sat in His Presence and done His work if evil or dissatisfaction had filled my heart?"

"I think people change, according to what happens to them," Sam countered.

"Sam," Father McConnaughey said softly.

"No," Metatron said abruptly. "He is right to feel suspicion, right to question everything. The conspiracy in Heaven has changed the world and only a fool would take what he is told at face value." He turned to Sam. "When the archangels looked down and saw the flood waters recede, they felt His going as well. We all did. We didn't know if He had given up on them, his creations, and on us, or if He would be back. We didn't know anything. I don't remember who raised the issue of the Word, of the power inherent in the five tablets, but I knew, immediately, that without the tablets, which were safely hidden on Earth, they would come for me, to find out what I knew." He straightened in the chair slightly. "I fled to this plane, knowing they would not stop until they'd wrested every last piece of information from me, and I knew who the keepers were, you see," he said earnestly, leaning forward as he met Sam's gaze. "Knew that they would be able to tear it out of me and retrieve the tablets for themselves."

Father Emilio cleared his throat. "We have a prophecy, or a part of a prophecy that claims it is a mortal who can reveal the hiding place of the Angel tablet," he said, gesturing vaguely. "Is that incorrect?"

"I do not know of such a prophecy," Metatron said, turning to look at him. "There are many things I do not know, things that happened after I fell and took a mortal vessel."

The Jesuit glanced at Father McConnaughey. "Who of the Watchers was the keeper of the Angel tablet?"

"Sariel," the scribe said. "He was the strongest of them."

"And Chuck's vision?" Jerome asked, his voice expressionless. "You've read it, and he is, technically, your prophet, what does it mean, what he's seen?"

"Another thing I do not know, I'm afraid," Metatron said, shaking his head. "The location, in the desert, seems to fit with what you already know about the Angel tablet. But the descriptions make no sense to me, not of the storm, nor of the man becoming a star, or the scenes that follow, the deaths of the angels. He is a writer, is he not? Perhaps it is not related to the tablets?"

"Nothing Chuck has seen in the last year has been unrelated to the tablets," Sam said brusquely. "We just don't usually find out until its too goddamned late."

* * *

><p><em><strong>West Keep, Kansas<strong>_

Dean flexed his fingers carefully. Even the sting had gone out of the burns. He wondered if he could drive, wearing gloves over the bandages. Probably not, he thought, remembering the state of the roads on the way to Michigan. He looked down at the children sleeping in the cot, comfortably full and clean and worn out from their exploration of the living room floor and the small selection of simple toys she'd found for them.

They'd talked, spent the entire morning talking – she'd asked questions, and he'd answered them as best as he could, and it hadn't been as hard as he'd thought it would be. In some ways, it'd been so close to the way they'd been, just talking things over, thinking aloud almost, to each other. What she'd asked him had been connected to the things she had remembered, he'd realised an hour or so into it. Remembered in fragments from Chitaqua, from Kansas. The hardest question had been her memory of him pointing a gun at her, telling her to go to sleep. That had been a fragmented memory for him as well, the effect of the medallion had been strong enough to override everything and he didn't think he'd been much help in explaining it to her.

"Merrin told me that children look adorable like this to ensure that their parents will never leave them, no matter how much they scream the rest of the time," Alex whispered to him, the corner of her mouth lifting slightly. She was standing close to him, hands resting on the rail of the infant's bed.

He smiled a little at the idea and met her gaze as she looked up at him. Time disappeared, the past disappeared, memory disappeared and he felt her there again, knowing him, wanting him, the warmth in her eyes and face so familiar that he leaned toward her without thinking about it.

He didn't know what he'd expected, what he wanted even. And she didn't move away, lifting her chin slightly, her mouth soft under his. But that simple, physical action changed everything in an instant.

_Desire that spiralled into intense arousal in seconds. Relief that it hadn't gone, all that he'd wanted. Need that flowed like molten metal through his body … _a yearning sweeping through him so powerful he couldn't think at all, just feel, just ache. His arms were around her and for a second, hers were around him, and a feeling of profound acceptance, unlooked at, unacknowledged, filled him. Then her hands were against his chest and she was pushing hard, backing away from him, eyes wide, pupils huge, lips swollen and slightly parted and her breath rasping out between them.

"I – that – I – I'm sorry, I'm sorry," she stammered at him, taking another step back as he looked at her, twisting around and walking fast from the room and down the hall and he ducked his head, hearing his pulse thundering in his ears, every emotion that he hadn't let himself feel for the last eight months hitting him, all together, all at once.

What the hell had happened, he wondered as he followed her slowly, out of the room and into the living room.

Leaning against the sofa, her arms wrapped tightly around herself, Alex looked up at him. "I'm sorry."

He shook his head. "You don't have to – it's okay, just – I, uh ..."

"Is that how it was?" she asked him abruptly. "With us? That – much?"

"Yeah," he said, looking away uncomfortably, not entirely sure of what she meant. "I mean, it wasn't, I wasn't that – most of the time – it was just that I haven't –" He gave up with a soft huff of breath. "Yeah."

She caught her lip between her teeth as she looked at him. "I know that I – that we – have been doing okay, I mean getting along and you helping, and – it's just that was – I don't really know you, I don't remember _feeling_ that, and I wanted – I was ready to–" She cut herself off, shaking her head, dragging in a deep breath and letting it out. "This is my fault, I know that, and I'm sorry. I can't feel that much, when I don't know you."

Looking down at the floor between them, Dean nodded, fiercely repressing the sudden sense of loss that was filling his throat. "Sure, I get that," he said, coughing a little when he realised his voice sounded too high. "I've got to go to Michigan," he added, relieved at the more normal timbre. "See Boze about the trainees."

"Okay," Alex said after a moment. "I'll see you when you get back."

"Yeah." He looked up, his gaze cutting slightly past her. "A few days."

Turning, he grabbed the canvas duffel from the sofa and headed for the front door, shoulders hunched a little as he felt her gaze on his back.

* * *

><p><em><strong>December 2, 2013. Camp Tawas, Lake Tawas, Michigan<strong>_

It'd always been like that and he hadn't thought about it, had wanted the intimacy so much he hadn't even considered how it might feel to her, he thought, leaning into the corner between the truck's seat back and the door.

Rufus glanced at over at him, noting the pinched-looking shadows under the man's eyes, in the hollows of the stubble-covered cheeks.

"Something happened?" he ventured finally. He hadn't wanted to say anything when Dean had turned up, asking him if he was ready to go. There'd been a huge 'go-away' vibe radiating from him then.

Dean flicked a sideways look at him and shook his head, straightening in the seat to take in the passing scenery with a distinct lack of interest.

"How many Boze say he wanted to send back?" he asked, and Rufus sighed inwardly.

"They took six hundred folks from us when we got back, squeezed them up pretty tight," he said expressionlessly, his gaze on the road. "They can permanently accommodate about three-fifty, he said."

Ghost Valley had been completely rebuilt, the farm houses now encircled by a wall that held a tunnel to the main keep a half-mile away. Lightning Oak and White Stream both had room for more and Liev wanted to expand Woodland keep, which had barely been an outpost before the attacks.

They had enough room, he considered. Not that it was his decision to make these days. He didn't miss that. Didn't miss that at all. Jackson and Liev and Riley were handling things in the keeps just fine.

"We can fit 'em in," he said to Rufus, pulling a pair of sunglasses from the truck's glove box and settling them over his eyes. "Have to figure out a better way of getting them back to Kansas."

The older hunter nodded. The roads were getting worse and the effort required to scrape them back and re-surface wasn't going to be worthwhile with such a small population. They had graders and people to use them, he thought. Sooner or later they'd go back to gravel everywhere and just paving the towns and safeholds. At least the older vehicles would have no problems with that.

* * *

><p>Dean woke as Rufus slowed down for the gate into the camp, hands and arms itching slightly. Daniel, on gate duty and standing by the truck with an iron knife in one hand and a silver blade in the other, looked down, nonplussed, at the bandages that wound from knuckles to above the elbow. Dean grinned at him slightly, pulling the collar of his shirt down and offering his shoulder for the iron and silver tests.<p>

The camp looked lived-in, he thought as Rufus drove up the curving incline to the main building. It was tidy enough, but every one of the buildings that they'd built along the insides of the stockade walls had some kind of business in them, the wares for sale displayed hung or arranged in tables out the front, most of the hand-lettered advising suitable barter goods for payment. Commerce already, he realised, and wondered how long it would take before they would need a government and printing presses for currency. When they'd started, everyone had done their work and eaten the food, and there hadn't been businesses of any kind. Things had changed faster – a lot faster – than he'd anticipated.

Following his gaze, Rufus grinned. "Honeymoon's over."

Dean looked at him. "Some freakin' honeymoon that was."

"Yeah, wasn't the best," Rufus agreed, pulling up in front of the steps. "Still, we can hope that the rest'll be better."

Dean looked at him sourly as he got out. "Where do you buy that optimism, anyway?"

They walked up the steps and met Renee at the front door.

"Boze is in the office, Jo's over but Ty had to stay at Lake West, Sean's training and said he'll be in later," she said in a rush, looking from one to the other.

"Hey, good to see you too," Dean said, one brow lifting at her flustered appearance.

"Sorry!" she said, backing and turning for the main staircase inside. "Twins!"

She was gone, the sound of her feet thumping up the wooden stairs as they turned for the door leading to the offices. As they reached it, it opened and Dean stepped aside automatically, noticing Dominique first, the man with his arm around her waist little more than a blurred impression as they passed him.

"Rufus," Dom said, slowing down. "This is Arnie."

Dean watched Rufus' face smooth out, the dark eyes flick to the man and back to her. "How are you, Dom?"

"I'm good," she said coolly. "Kids are growing fast."

"They always do."

"Turner, isn't it?" Arnie asked, holding his hand out. Dean winced inwardly as he saw Rufus look at the hand and then back to the woman in front of him without taking it.

"You take care," he said expressionlessly.

"I always do." She nodded to Dean and turned away, Arnie following her reluctantly as he looked back over his shoulder at the two hunters.

"That went well," Dean said, pushing the door open and starting down the hall.

"She made her choice."

"You made yours, you mean," Dean said, under his breath.

Rufus' hearing was still keen and he shrugged. "Yeah, and I made my mine."

"You okay?"

"I look okay to you?" the older hunter huffed at him, affronted. "You worry about your own problems."

Dean lengthened his stride, and opened the door to the office, hiding a grin as Rufus gave him a warning look.

Inside, Boze sat behind the big oak desk, Jo perched in a straight-backed chair to one side, and two other men sitting on the long, leather-upholstered sofa, the low table in front of them covered with maps and notes.

"Dean, Rufus, this is Steve Brigman and Craig Pitt," Boze said, getting to his feet and gesturing at the men. Dean and Rufus nodded to them, both turning to look at the big hunter as he limped around to the sofa.

"Steve and Craig came in with the demon army," Boze continued, easing himself down into the chair. "Both worked for the railways, before the virus."

"That so?" Rufus asked, walking slowly to the big armchair opposite Boze. Dean glanced at Jo. She lifted one brow as he walked to the desk, leaning back against the edge.

"It is," Steve said, looking from Rufus to Dean, and then to Boze. "We thought we could help out with some of the transportation issues the camps – and the keeps in Kansas – are facing."

"What transportation issues are we facing?" Dean asked, his face impassive.

"Dean, just hear them out, alright?" Boze looked at him entreatingly. "They've got some pretty darned good ideas."

"At the moment, everything's by road, but the roads are getting worse and they're not easy to repair – they're costly and they're labour-intensive, they also need a lot of skilled labour, in many cases, and difficult-to-come-by materials – tell me I'm wrong," Steve said, one brow lifted challengingly as he looked from Dean to Rufus.

Dean shrugged. "Not wrong."

"Right," Craig cut in. "But the railways in this country, and all over the world, were built primarily with small groups of unskilled labour – well, big groups, but they were able to be divided into different areas. The track is there, from Detroit to Kansas City, we just need to survey it and repair any areas that have been damaged or lost, and we're good to move people, or supplies, or trade between the camps and keeps in very efficient way."

"You see, we can run steam engines, don't need electricity and we'll have coal or timber available for the rest of our lives, and for generations down the line," Steve added, nodding.

"What do you need?" Rufus asked. He leaned back in the chair, calculating the other places rail had run to or through, his mind already leaping ahead to the south and the cotton fields that Kelly and Riley had said were re-seeding.

"To begin with, two or three hunters," Steve said, glancing at Craig. "Maybe a couple of civilians, to handle driving, camping etcetera, we need to survey to line and work out how much work needs doing, what kind of labour we'll need, how much it's going to take in the way of materials, that kind of thing."

"I told 'em they could take Sean, four of the trainees we've got here, and when we get to KC, you'll send out a team to escort them to Lebanon and back again," Boze said.

"What d'you think?" Rufus directed the question at Dean.

"Not many needed, we can manage that," he replied. "Depends on all the other problems, but as a starting point it's okay."

Dean could feel both Boze and Jo's eyes on him as he looked back at the railway men. Neither said anything. Hunter business was still, primarily, hunter business.

"Got your go," Boze said to Brigman and Pitt. "Knock yerselves out."

"Great."

"Pleasure to meet you," Pitt said to Rufus and Dean as he stood and gathered up his notes.

"Where'd they find you?" Dean asked curiously. Both men were big, in reasonable shape, neither bearing the etched-in lines that came with a struggle for survival over a long period of time.

Steve dropped his gaze, shrugging a little sheepishly. "We were – still are – hunting buddies, for years now," he said, looking back at Dean.

"When the virus hit, we didn't even know about it for more than three months," Craig added. "We'd taken our vacation time and gone hunting up on the Washington-British Columbian border and by the time we got back, everything we'd had had gone."

_Home? Families_, Dean wondered? They seemed pretty together for that kind of loss.

"Neither of us had families," Steve said, answering that question. "We figured we'd be better off keeping out of sight for a while and we headed north-west, found a quiet place in northern Montana, just hunted and trapped and fished for a couple of years."

"Sounds like you did alright," Rufus said, his tone neutral.

"We thought it must be over, by the time we headed south again, late last year," Craig told them. "Got caught by a couple of kids in Billings and penned up someplace in the mountains."

"Woke up on what looked like a battlefield," Steve finished, rolling the maps and tucking them under his arm.

"You got lucky," Jo said, getting up abruptly and moving to stand beside the desk.

"Yeah, it seems we really did," Craig agreed. He turned to look at Dean, curiosity evident in his expression. "Heard a lot of things about you."

Dean's mouth twisted up. "Don't believe it, you know what rumours are like."

The man dropped his gaze, nodding acknowledgement, and followed Steve to the door.

Rufus closed it behind them and turned around to look at Boze. "They tested with everything?"

"Absolutely everything, twice now, and every time they come and go from the camp," Boze confirmed. "I think they did just get lucky, relative to most folks, that is."

"Alright," Dean said, walking over to the sofa and dropping onto it. "Solves one of the problems with getting things between us, but it's not why we're here. Sounds like it'll be months before they're ready to run an engine on those lines, you going to keep the people here for that length of time?"

"Sure," Boze said, glancing at Jo for confirmation. "We're managing and they're getting a lot of practice hunting regular in the forests."

"How's the weather been here?" Rufus asked him, leaning forward in the chair.

"Colder than usual, not so much snow as usual," Jo answered for him, moving to take a seat beside Dean. "There's another guy we picked up from the Grigori army, says he's a radar specialist," she continued. "We're trying to get him what he needs for ground-based precipitation radar, but it's been hard to find the parts."

"Ground-based precipitation radar?" Rufus repeated, looking at Boze.

"It's got a hundred-mile range, what Ray's trying to build," Boze said with a shrug. "Give us warning of storms moving toward us, which would help with making sure no one dies the old-fashioned way out here."

"There are a lot of good reasons for getting it set up," Jo added, leaning into the corner of the sofa. She looked at Boze. "Are you going to tell them, or do I have to?"

"Tell us what?" Rufus asked suspiciously.

"Not sure about it just yet," Boze said, a thread of uneasiness in his voice. "Just had a bunch of anecdotal stories from folks who've been up to the head of the peninsula, checking the game trails."

"And?" Dean looked at him impatiently.

"Four wraith sightings, this last month," Jo said sharply, looking at him. "One sighting of what we think might be wendigo tracks, and Sean came in last night, saying his group had found more than two dozen tracks, human, in the forest down toward Detroit. They were heading south."

Rufus' brow lifted. "Wendigo moved south. We told you about that."

"Wraiths don't move from their territories," Dean said, looking from Jo to Rufus. "Bogs and marshes, not lakes."

"Well, they're moving now," Jo said, shaking her head.

"Did Sean send anyone after the humans?" Dean decided against arguing with her.

Both Rufus and Dean saw the look exchanged between Jo and Boze. "What?"

"Sean'll be back in an hour or two," Boze said, looking through the window. "Best if he tells you what they saw."

"Why?" Rufus frowned at the Tawas leader.

"It's not – there were difficult circumstances," Jo said. "It was what we wanted your opinions on, but you need to hear from the people who saw it."

"Fine," Dean said, tired suddenly of the hedging. "I'm starving, and it was a long drive," he told her shortly. "And I need someone to change these and put more of Oliver's crap on."

She nodded, getting up. "Come on, Renee's got food waiting and a room if you want to get cleaned up, then you can go see Meredyth."

* * *

><p>"Can I keep a sample of this?" Meredyth looked into the tub of creamy ointment.<p>

"Sure," Dean said absently, looking down the length of his arms. The redness was gone, and the new skin was growing under the old, the top layer peeling off in fine, translucent layers as if it was just a bad sunburn. They itched like crazy.

"How's Alex?" The doctor asked as she scooped a small amount of the ointment from the tub into a glass tube and sealed it.

Dean looked at her, wondering how on earth to answer that. "Uh, she's okay."

"I meant, have more memories returned?" Meredyth said dryly, turning back with a bowl of warm salt-infused water and cleaning off the loose, flaking skin and the remains of the cream from his left arm.

"Oh. Not that I know of," he said, uncomfortably aware of the mix of truth and non-truth in that. "She asked about her past, but she says that the answers don't have a connection to her, they're, uh, dry."

Meredyth nodded. "It won't come back through Q and A, unfortunately."

"Will she get them back?" he asked abruptly. "Everything?"

"I don't know," she said slowly, smoothing the cream up from wrist to elbow. "What we know about the brain, about the mind, it was never much, even with all the gadgetry under the sun at our disposal. People have woken from comas, have regained motor function when the necessary brain cells have been destroyed … we know that the brain has a lot of redundant areas, sometimes those are used to function as back up systems." She wrapped the arm in gauze and a light, thin bandage, looking at him. "Jerome sent me the details of what they found about that machine. I didn't sleep without nightmares for a week."

"Yeah, good times, that one."

She smiled thinly. "Quite, but not my point. I just read about it. It happened to her, not just once by the sounds of it. I have no idea what they were trying to achieve but one of the things we do know about the human mind is that it tries to protect itself, and it has a really remarkable set of tools to do it."

"You're saying I should feel lucky that she didn't end up schizo," Dean said bluntly.

"Multiple personality disorder is the term, actually, and yeah, that's what I'm saying," she said, wiping her hands and pushing back the carrot-red fringe from her forehead as she looked over the right arm in front of her. "I don't know her, not really. I met her briefly once before it happened, and I don't know how strong she is, how hard she'd fight to save her sanity – or her children. Renee said that she had a rough time even before the virus, and then a few things also happened afterward, so I've been assuming that she must be pretty strong?"

He looked down as she cleaned off the arm. "Yeah, pretty strong."

"Well, that's a good thing," she told him, balling up the cotton wool she'd used to clean the arm and scooping out the ointment. "It means she's used to fighting, used to having to fight to survive. That will help."

"If it all came back at once," he said hesitantly, looking at her face. "How bad would that be, for her?"

Meredyth wiped her hands and picked up the gauze, and he wondered if she was going to answer him.

"To be honest, I don't know," she said, wrapping the dressings lightly. "Not my specialty and even if it was, I don't think I'd like to hazard a guess on that."

"So you think it'd be bad?"

"Yes," she said, not looking at him, focussing on winding the bandage over the gauze. "I think it would be very bad."

The itch was dissipating, he realised, flexing his fingers and feeling the elasticity of moving skin again instead of the cracked sensations he'd felt the first day. Closing his hand carefully he found that he tighten the fist quite a bit.

"Thanks, doc," he said to her, sliding off the stool and straightening up.

"That cream is extraordinary," she said, looking at her sample. "If I can't reproduce it here satisfactorily, I'd like to organise a trade for something to get a good supply in."

"No need," Dean told her. "I'll get Oliver to send a few cases the next time anyone's coming this way."

"Thank you," she said, looking at him gratefully. "Keep them clean."

"Yeah."

He turned and walked out of the room, rolling down the sleeves of the shirt he was wearing, looking down at the cuffs, his gaze jerking up too late as a man ran into him, cool hands brushing over his fingers as he stepped back automatically, the man twisting away and looking at him apologetically.

"I'm sorry," the man said, shaking his head. "I wasn't watching –"

Dean turned away, glancing at his watch. "S'fine."

Sean should be back, he thought, lengthening his stride as he headed back toward the offices. And they could hear what the hell it was that had freaked out both Jo and Boze so thoroughly.

* * *

><p><em><strong>Lourdes Castle, Lourdes, France<strong>_

The stone room was cool, lit only by the flickering light of the banks of monitors that lined two of the walls. Deeper still in the levels below the castle, diesel generators chugged, feeding power to the entire building.

Peter's brows drew together as his gaze moved from the data displayed on one monitor to another. The feed from the GOES satellite had been routed from the order safehold, four streams containing thermal imaging of the weather patterns now over the Canadian and continental United States, cloud movement, extrapolated wind and temperature readings. It wasn't those that were bothering him. The movement of the polar air current, known as the northern polar jet stream was what he was watching.

Normally, the current meandered, north and south, stretching out for thousands of miles as it circled the globe from west to east, a few hundred miles wide. The aberration on the monitor showed not a horizontal variation, but a vertical one. He stared at the screen as the air current lifted suddenly, and a quick glance at the other monitor showed the stream, driven by a marked differential in the temperature of the polar air mass and warmer air over the temperate land, become significantly colder as it seemed to lift into the upper reaches of the atmosphere, touching the frigid edges of the mesosphere before dipping terrestrially again.

Where the jet stream dropped to the land, he watched the turbulence form, a vortex created on the thermal imagery. Glancing at the photography sent down from the satellite, he saw the previous dip shown, over the coastline near Nome, the thick clouds rotating as the colder air was pulled down to earth.

Not a cyclonic action, he thought, reaching for the handset of the phone that sat on the desk without taking his eyes from the monitors.

"Michel," he said into the phone, staring at the times that flicked along the bottom of the screen. "Have you looked at the GOES data, over the US?"

"Hold on," the programmer's voice sounded tinnily in his ear. He waited, imagining the tall, gawky man moving along the curving desk and bringing up the data on the monitors.

"_Merde_." The word was breathed into the phone. Peter heard the frantic clicking of keys in the background.

"Is it what it looks like?" he asked, when there was a silent break.

"I don't know," Michel said. "I need Francois, I will call you back, Peter."

"Do we need to warn the Americans?"

"Yes, I'll do that." Another flurry of keystrokes chattered across the line. "_Merde, merde, merde!_"

"Michel," Peter interrupted. "Could someone be controlling this? Uh, the angels or the Grigori, with a spell?"

"I don't think so," the programmer said distractedly. "I need more information, Peter, I'll call you back."

"_Oui_, alright."

He set the phone down and looked at the screens. The satellite photographs of the area had updated, and the eye of the vortex had moved, southward along the coastline. From above, the tight, spinning formation looked like a tornado, except that the rotation was clockwise.

* * *

><p><em><strong>December 3, 2013. Camp Tawas, Lake Tawas, Michigan<strong>_

"Croats," Dean said flatly, staring at Sean.

The younger man shrugged. "There were a bit more than a couple of dozen," he said. "Mostly in skins. They didn't look like they used to, but Zoe got a good look at a couple through the glasses, and they were covered in pock-marks."

"The ones who survived Pestilence's plagues?" Rufus glanced at Dean, one brow lifted.

Awesome, Dean thought angrily. Angels, monsters, now this.

"If it hadn't been for the scarring, and the skins," Zoe said quietly. "I would've thought they were survivors, ordinary people. They've stopped eating people, I think, they didn't look that diseased anymore."

"All the better to infect an unsuspecting population?" Rufus mused, mostly to himself. "Short of grabbing a couple and looking for anomalies in the bloodstream or cells or whatever, how would we be able to tell?"

Dean shook his head. "That's exactly what we'll have to do," he growled. "If we're very lucky, there won't be all that many of them, and they'll stay clear of us while we're up to our necks in the rest of the crap, but we're going to have to go looking for them – carefully – and grab one, sooner or later." He looked at Boze and Jo. "Better think about some kind of quarantine zone to stop them from walking into the camps, I'll let Jackson and Bobby know that we need to do the same."

He got up from the chair and stalked out of the room as Rufus turned to Boze. Zoe rose and followed him out. Next to Boze, Jo watched her go. The young woman had arrived at the camp a few months earlier, and had spent a lot of time telling anyone who'd listen what she thought of Dean Winchester. Renee had been the one to put a stop to that, she thought. It was obvious to most of the people in the camps where the ill-feeling had come from.

* * *

><p>"Dean," Zoe said, hurrying to catch up with the man's long strides.<p>

He stopped abruptly, turning and staring at her coldly. "What?"

What she'd done was still a thorn in his memories, and he watched her flinch a little at his expression.

"I just wanted to say I was sorry," she said, lifting her gaze to meet his. "It wasn't –"

"Fine. You're sorry," he cut her off impatiently, turning away. "Done. Goodbye."

"I only did it because I love you!" she said loudly to his back.

He stopped, cringing inwardly both at the scene she was creating, and at her lack of sense. "No, you don't," he said, turning back to look at her. "You took what you wanted. And you were a fucking spiteful bitch when you realised you weren't going to be able to keep doing it."

Looking down at her, he could see he wasn't even close to getting that through to her. "Just stay the fuck away, alright? Let's leave it at that."

He turned away and kept walking down the hall, hoping that the silence behind him meant a tacit agreement. He had enough to think about without adding any more crap to his load.

Zoe watched him go, her hands balled into fists and her heart thumping uncomfortably in her chest. He was wrong, she thought furiously. But any chance of proving that was gone.

* * *

><p><em><strong>December 4, 2013. US-40, Missouri<strong>_

"Railway might be the way to go for a lot of things," Rufus said, looking in the side-mirrors at the two trucks following them. Twenty people, most with the basic training in hunting and soldiering, from Sean and Jo's recommendations. The rest would be on rail duty until the lines were working and they could be re-settled in Kansas. It would help, he thought. Losing Vince had been a hard blow.

"Mmm," Dean muttered noncommittally from the passenger seat.

"Wouldn't need so many experienced hunters to protect a train," Rufus tried again, flicking a glance at the taciturn expression on the man beside him. He'd been withdrawn and morose on the way out, he thought. None of the news they'd gotten had done much for the mood, but he had the feeling that something else had happened in Tawas that was eating at the hunter.

"What's going on?" he asked, when the silence had stretched out a little too long.

"Nothing."

Rufus sighed deeply. "Right. Nothing."

Dean turned his head slightly to look at him. "What happened with you and Dom?"

"Nothing," Rufus said automatically, catching Dean's humourless grin in the corner of his eye as the word came out. "Nothing important," he qualified.

"Right."

"She got pregnant," Rufus said reluctantly after another five minutes of silence.

Dean frowned, straightening a little in the seat. "You weren't exclusive, were you?"

"No."

No, that'd been the deal but it'd felt different when he'd gone back and found out. He let out another long breath. He hadn't wanted to do the diaper-and-broken-nights thing again. Had done that, been there, lived through all the unspoken fears that plagued parents through the first five years and then simmered on, pushed more to the background but still there, for the next twenty, thirty … but, he'd known all along, the bottom line was he hadn't wanted to even look at the risk of losing another child, couldn't think near that possibility.

"No," Rufus repeated. "Just didn't think about it until it happened, and then I took off. She's pissed at me and I don't blame her for that."

Dean looked out the window, his face expressionless. Shooting another sideways look at him, Rufus saw the flat stare and turned his attention back to the road.

* * *

><p><em><strong>December 5, 2013. Litteris Hominae, Kansas<strong>_

Dean sat impatiently in the library, listening to the argument around him and wondering how long he'd have to wait before he could make some excuse and get out of there. Nothing new had been added for at least an hour now. His brother wasn't even here, had gone with Father Emilio to Woodland, apparently, for some reason he hadn't bothered to listen to.

"The weather pattern may not be fixed –" Jasper said, staring at Jerome.

"Michel has tracked the data back and run two simulations, based on what has happened so far," Jerome said tiredly. "Both show an increase in the phenomenon, and a worsening winter outlook, including the very good chance of at least one, if not more, of the polar vortices moving much further south. In 1985, a single aberrant vortex shifted from the arctic circle through Canada and down to Maine, and there were record snowstorms, ice storms and minimum and mean temperature records broken that year."

"That doesn't mean –" the linguist started to argue and Jackson held up his hand, shaking his head.

"No, Jasper, it doesn't mean that the same thing will happen again, only that the odds are rising steadily in its favour. And at least we have some warning of it," he said, his rough voice cutting across the table and silencing Jasper. "The last four winters have been bad and have been getting worse with each year. And I think we've all had to sit out an ice-storm, sometime in our lives."

Jackson looked around the table in the silence that followed. "Alright, so we're all on the same page. Let's figure out what we can do, which starts with protecting what we've got."

"Gonna see more action from the sort of critters who make their homes further north," Bobby warned him, and he nodded slowly.

"We'll deal with the nuts and bolts in a separate session, I think, Bobby," he said, flicking a questioning look at Dean, who nodded in agreement.

"Do we think this – ice hurricane – or whatever it is, is what Chuck saw in the vision?" Rufus asked, looking around. "'Cause it might put a time-line on the when of the vision for a change."

"It could be," Felix answered him carefully, sliding a furtive look at Dean before he continued. "The desert, we think, is probably the location of the angel tablet, the underground city. The only prophecy we have connected to that, apart from what Davis told us about the archaeological dig there – or in that vicinity actually – is the one where the mortal sweeps away the sands and reveals the city's exact entrance."

Dean scowled at the floor. "Well, we're no closer to figuring out who that magic person might be," he said sardonically. "Alain sent the translation for the rest of the Vatican texts yet?"

Jerome shook his head. "They're working on it, they've sent some here and Jasper and Felix have been going through them." He looked at the angel sitting in the armchair beside the fire. "Unless you know more about them?"

"The history of the bloodline of the Lamb was recorded until 1498," Metatron said with a shrug. "Then I believe it died out. I did look through the Vatican's texts for a period of time in the late sixteen hundreds, but I couldn't find anything that suggested that the bloodline had been found again, or that the so-called prophecy about the last scion was anything more than wishful thinking on the part of either the Church or Heaven. And very well hidden wishful thinking at that."

Katherine nodded. "There were supposed to be verifying documents, in the vaults. I can't imagine why they would've wanted to keep them, since they've denied Christ was an ordinary man since day one, but perhaps someone there valued the historical nature of them more than the outcry that would follow if they'd ever gotten out," she said acerbically. "It doesn't matter one way or the other because we have no possible way to search for such a descendant now, and we're not sure if the person mentioned in the prophecy even connects to that myth."

Chuck leaned across the table. "The tablets are supposed to be used together, that's what the Qaddiysh told us."

Metatron's eyes narrowed on the piece of stone sitting on the table in front of Chuck. He'd watched the prophet bring it in and set it down on the polished wood surface, next to his laptop and he had not noticed the man move it around or even touch it since then. It was more than a foot from the laptop now, sitting in the middle of the table, closer to Katherine and Marla than it was to the prophet.

"But by who?" Bobby asked peevishly. "We got contradictory accounts coming out of our ears and no way to check on any of 'em."

"And not much time to do anything about it, even if we could," Rufus added.

The meeting had ended as they usually did, Dean thought, walking down the hall to the offices near the armoury where the priests had taken up residence, most of the time, with nothing concrete decided and a whole lotta crap that had to be checked first. The order, and the keep leaders, knew about the croats, the railways and the movement of the monsters at least. He'd put his two cents in.

* * *

><p>Father McConnaughey looked up as he came into the office, the Irishman's lined face creasing up in a smile.<p>

"Mr Winchester, it's a rare thing when you come to seek me out," he said as Dean walked to the desk, reaching for the bottle and glasses on the cupboard beside him.

Dean's mouth twisted up in acknowledgement. He sat in the chair in front of the clergyman's desk and leaned over to accept the glass of whiskey.

"I, uh, wanted some advice," he said awkwardly, looking down into the glass.

"Spiritual?" Father McConnaughey asked in surprise.

"Not really," Dean corrected him, the one-sided smile lifting higher. "Moral, maybe."

"Never been your problem, Dean," the priest said, leaning back in the chair and looking at him thoughtfully. "About what?"

"About Alex."

"Ah."

Dean glanced over at him. "Yeah … ah. Is it better for her to not remember, padre? Not have all that crap in her memories, everything that happened to her?"

"Better for who? For her?"

"Yeah."

Father McConnaughey leaned forward, blue eyes narrowing. "Do you have a means of blocking her memories forever?"

"Uh, no," Dean said, looking away uncomfortably. "I just figured that if I wasn't pushing her to remember, she might have a better life." He looked at the priest. "I'd sleep better at night without a helluva lot of my memories."

"Even though you're aware that you wouldn't be the same person you are now without them?" the priest asked him with a slight smile.

Looking mulishly at him, Dean replied, "I'd be a better person than I am now, without those memories."

"No, you wouldn't," Father McConnaughey countered with certainty. "Different, yes, unquestionably, but not better, not at all. You've been tested, and none of it was easy, and none of it was plain and clear, but you are stronger now, you have been tempered now, to a mettle that very few ever see."

"In any case, it is not your decision to make," the priest continued when Dean didn't respond. "Your chivalry in this matter is noble, but futile, and not only futile, but likely to bite you in the ass."

Dean's head snapped up at the blunt phrase. "What's that supposed to mean?"

The priest's face softened a little with compassion as he studied the younger man. "Did you fall in love with a woman who had it easy, Dean? Or with one who has struggled on, despite everything, who has remained clear and steadfast and is someone you can trust with your very soul, because of all those events she has faced and survived?"

Tossing back the whiskey in the glass, Dean set it back on the desk and nodded to the priest. "Thanks for the drink."

Father McConnaughey watched him walk across the office and out the door. He was a difficult man to get close to, he knew, keeping much of himself private from others. And if Emilio was correct in his predictions of what was coming, it would go hard with him again. He wasn't entirely sure how much more the oldest of the three Winchester brothers could take.

* * *

><p><em><strong>December 8, 2013. West Keep, Kansas<strong>_

Alex knelt in front of the bath, James and Evelyn propped in small plastic seats in the shallow water that filled the bottom of the tub, one part of her mind focussed on the expressions on their faces – and avoiding the enthusiastic splashes each somehow managed to get her with at every bathing session – and another wondering if her reaction to what had happened had been the final straw for Dean.

He'd left for Michigan the following morning, and Merrin had told her when he'd come back. That'd been four days ago. _Busy_, she told herself, believing it for a while. _Busy and loaded down by the responsibilities he carried_, she reminded herself, only half-convinced.

_Or_, she'd thought on the third day, _he's given up on trying to get back what he'd had_.

Her reaction had been too much, she knew. Not that she could've controlled the way she'd felt, as it was happening. Every nerve had hit flashpoint and she thought later, with some time and distance that it'd been as if her body remembered him completely, even if her mind didn't. And it hadn't occurred to her to wonder, until after he'd left the keep completely, if that physical memory was a way back to the other memories, if she'd could've recovered them all, if she'd just been brave enough to risk those out-of-control feelings that had surged in her, arousal and longing mixed up with emotions that had torn at her heart with their strength.

Evelyn pursed her lips and blew a raspberry at her, tiny hands reaching out, and she gave the baby the clean washcloth, watching it disappear into her daughter's mouth as she rubbed it over her gums. They were sometimes a little redder than usual, Alex thought, looking closely now. It seemed a bit early for teething, and it was hard to tell, since the mouth seemed to be the children's primary sense organ and everything they came across went into it if she wasn't vigilant.

Had he been hurt by her rejection? Trying to look at it from his perspective, she had the horrible feeling it'd been more than a shock, more like a slap. It didn't matter that she hadn't meant it that way. That was the most likely way he'd have taken it.

"Come on, you two, let's get you out and dry before you prune up," she told the babies, leaning over the tub's edge to lift Evie's slippery body out of the chair and wrap her in a soft towel.

The question was, could she do anything about it now? She put a clean diaper on the infant and slipped her arms and legs into the warm, all-in-one suit, settling her on the padded mat as she retrieved James from the water and dried him.

"Do you think your dad is going to forgive me?" she asked her son. He looked up and frowned at her, waving his arms imperiously. "Yeah, that's what I think too."

Picking up both awkwardly, she left the bathroom in its state of chaos and walked to the living room. Feeds and maybe some reading, and then into bed for all of them, she thought tiredly.

* * *

><p>Dean sat in the empty office behind the kitchens. It had been Alex's; he'd taken it over when Maria and Freddie had moved their centre of operations closer to Chuck, Mitch and Deirdre. He fit, just, along the long sofa, and it was isolated from the main comings and goings in the keep.<p>

Leaning back in the chair, his boots propped on the desk in front of him, he stared sightlessly at the wall of empty shelves in front of him, the same scene playing out in his mind's eye, over and over again. Would she even let him near her again, after that, he wondered hopelessly? She'd apologised, had told him it was her fault, her problem, but he'd seen the panic in her eyes as she'd backed away.

"Dean?"

He looked at the door, open a few inches, Win's face peering through at him.

"Yeah?"

"Castiel is at the gates, he says he needs to talk to you," she said, pushing the door open a little wider. "We finished the angel-proofing and he can't get in."

_Huh_, he thought, _no doubt more good news_. "Okay, I'm coming."

Getting up, he left the glass of whiskey on the desk and threw another log onto the cheerfully crackling fire as he passed the hearth, snatching his coat from the rack next to the office door.

"Take another coat," Win said, glancing over him. "It's snowing out there."

He nodded and followed her up the corridor to the main hall, grabbing another coat from the collection overloading the hooks that lined one wall and dragging it on as he went out and down the steps.

_Not kidding_, he thought as he hurried through the swirling clumps being swept around the open bailey and into the relative shelter of the east tunnel. He felt in the pockets of the down parka and found a pair of gloves, pulling them on as he came out into the east bailey and headed for the gates.

"He's just outside," Alan called down to him, anonymous in the thick layers of clothing he wore. Dean glanced at the short, squat tower on the other side, wondering if Ben was on watch duty now as well.

The gates rumbled open and the wind hit him full in the face as he walked through, ducking his head and feeling his boot soles skidding slightly on the iced surface of the paved road. "Cas!?"

"Here," the angel said, against the wall behind him. The snow and wind stopped, the bubble of calm, warm air the angel created shielding them both. Dean rubbed a hand over his face, brushing off the sticky powder snow from his brows and lashes as he took in Cas' rigid expression.

"What?"

"The Qaddiysh are dead," the angel said, turning his head to look at him, dark-blue eyes filled with pain.


	6. Chapter 6 In the Distance, Getting Close

**Chapter 6 In the Distance, Getting Closer**

* * *

><p><em><strong>December 10, 2013. Camp Tawas, Lake Tawas, Michigan<strong>_

The transformation was not perfect, he thought to himself. Physically it was accurate, but there had not been enough time to acquire the mental and emotional information he needed. He looked at himself in the tarnished mirror above the sink and shrugged inwardly. It would have to do.

Following the man around the camp, it'd been apparent that there were several possible prospects with this face and body. Long practised in reading body language, some had been stronger than others, but all had shown definitive signs of interest. He crossed the cobbled road and walked up the steps into the main building, wondering where they might be at this time of evening.

He stepped out into the hall, walking along and going down the stairs, smiling at the people he passed. They smiled and nodded back at him and he relaxed a little more, turning from the bottom of the stairs into the large hall.

"Dean?"

Turning around, he looked at the woman standing by the door on the other side of the big hall. Thick, black wavy hair framed a very pretty tanned face, large dark eyes were wary and curious.

"Yeah?"

"I thought you'd left," she said, watching him as he walked to her. "With Rufus."

"Changed my mind," he told her, his mouth lifting to one side slightly as he looked down into her eyes. She wanted to believe in him, he realised with a moment's surprise. The memories of her were cloudy and indistinct, but there. He let the smile widen a little.

"So, here all on my ownsome, anything you can recommend to do around here?"

Her eyes widened as she heard the invitation in his voice.

* * *

><p>The lamp was on the other side of the room, casting a bright pool around itself, leaving the rest of the room in varying shades of dimness. Zoe looked at the face above her, the dark-green eyes fixed on hers and shuddered slightly as he thrust in again. It wasn't exactly the same, she thought, not acknowledging the disappointment. He'd thought she was someone else then.<p>

He stopped moving, his head lowering and his breath harshly panting over the skin of her shoulder. She lifted a hand to his cheek, focussing on the sight and feel of him, here. With her. In her.

"Why did you change your mind?" she asked him softly.

"About going?" he hedged, rolling off her and stretching out on his back.

"About me," she clarified, leaning on her elbow as she looked down at him. "What you said, it just seemed pretty final."

He was silent for a moment, eyes closed. "Realised what I was missing out on," he said finally. He turned his head, eyes opening to look at her. "I couldn't stop thinking about you."

"What about Alex?"

He hesitated for a second, a single fuzzy memory returning of a woman, staring up at him. He shook his head. "What about her?"

"Does that mean you'll stay?" she asked, her forehead creasing up a little as she tried to fathom what he might be saying to her. "What about your kids?"

"Could have more, here," he said, lifting a shoulder in a shrug. "With you."

Zoe looked at him doubtfully. "I love you, Dean, you know that, but a family …"

He smiled, rolling onto his shoulder and sliding his hand over her hip. "Could've started one now."

The frown on her face deepened and he wondered what he'd said. He'd had the strongest impression this was what she'd wanted from the man.

"That's – you know that's not possible," she said in a small voice, her gaze cutting away.

"Are you using something?" he asked.

She turned back to him and he could see that there was something he was supposed to know, something he'd missed.

"I'm barren," she said bluntly to him, her eyes shimmering. "You knew that. If you're here just to get revenge –"

"Barren," he said, ignoring everything else. "Just my luck, isn't it?"

He lifted the hand from her hip to her throat, and closed it tightly, blood bursting out from either side and between his fingers as the windpipe and spine were crushed.

"Just my fucking luck."

Getting off the bed, he pulled on his clothes and walked to the bathroom, washing the blood from his hands and looking into the mirror over the sink. There were more possibilities. He wasn't done with this one yet.

* * *

><p><em><strong>West Keep, Kansas<strong>_

"All of them?" Dean asked, staring at the angel.

"Sariel and Amaros escaped, but we don't know if they managed to get away completely," Cas said. "One of the nephilim was left alive."

Dean rubbed a hand over his jaw, looking at the snow blowing through the pools of light from the curtain wall without seeing it. More deaths from Heaven.

"Michael gonna take this seriously now, or is he still too chickenshit to clean up his own mess?" he asked the angel.

Cas looked away. "Michael and Gabriel are trying to find who has been manipulating these events in Heaven," he said heavily.

"I thought you said it was a rogue arc?"

"Camael could not have been responsible for all of it," the angel told him. "He only gained access to the library shortly after Metatron fled."

"How the hell you keeping score up there?" Dean asked, a caustic bite to his voice. "I thought this all started because of the Word?"

"I thought so too, at first," Cas admitted, looking back at him. "And I still think the primary goal was only conceived once that source of power was known."

"Why am I feeling a big 'but' coming here?"

"Lucifer was not the only archangel to have suffered from the sin of pride, Dean," Castiel said slowly. "All of them do – did – to a greater or lesser extent."

"Okay."

"Someone with a very long view has manipulated them, their pride, possibly even Lucifer himself, to rebel against Heaven," Cas continued, feeling his way. He hadn't even articulated his theory to himself before. "Someone who had access to the knowledge of Heaven, who knew about the plan for our Father's creations, who has kept himself in the shadows."

Dean exhaled gustily. "So Uriel, Raphael and Camael have just been pawns too?"

"I believe so."

"What about the others?"

"We were all forced to walk to the Path of Truth, after you killed Lucifer," Cas said, a slight frown marring his forehead. "I believe that the remaining archangels are not a part of the conspiracy."

"What _is_ the conspiracy?" Dean looked at him. "I mean, we seem to be looking at a lot of agendas out there."

Cas rubbed his fingertips over his temple, shaking his head slightly. "The Grigori want to return to Heaven. And they are being aided in that attempt. Camael has been convinced, somehow, that their return will make a difference to the leadership of Heaven, I believe. Someone wants to start the Second War and bring down the pillars that balance the universe, but I cannot imagine why, or who."

"What's the end result?"

"Of Heaven falling?" Cas lifted a brow. "A schism in the fabric of reality. Heaven – and every other plane – exist on our Father's Word. If one fell, was destroyed, it would break the Word, and then everything would fall."

Dean blinked at him. "What the fuck does that mean?"

"It means that the divisions created by our Father would cease to exist," Castiel said patiently. "Heaven, Hell, earth – all would be in a single plane of existence."

"Chaos," Dean said consideringly. "Is that what this angel wants? Complete chaos?"

"I believe so."

"Why?"

"I don't know," Cas said slowly. "Possibly to bring Him back."

"God?"

"Yes."

* * *

><p><em><strong>Litteris Hominae, Kansas<strong>_

The library was full. Dean looked at the shocked faces and sighed inwardly. "That's Cas' working theory."

"Well, glad to see he didn't hold back," Bobby said tiredly, feeling Ellen press closer against his shoulder. "That nephilim, Reuma, she said that even if Camael finds the tablet – all the tablets – he still can't use 'em?"

"That's what Cas said," Dean confirmed. "So we're back to the prophecies, I guess."

Jasper looked at him. "If only one can use them, is the matter of such deadly concern to us?"

"Only if they figure out who the one is," Rufus interjected, his voice sour. "Chuck, what did you say the story is about the demon tablet?"

The writer looked up, pushing his glasses further up his nose. His eyesight had been degenerating a little lately. Too much close work he thought. "The tablet itself holds a lot of juice. I can't touch that power, even though I can feel it, but that's not to say that it's only accessible to this 'one' whoever that is. It might need a key, or a specific spell, but I can't rule out that, on its own, it couldn't be tapped somehow with the right …um… tools."

"Jerome, we got any intel on how close the team is to the target?" Sam asked.

"Michel sent a communiqué this morning," Jerome said, nodding. "Kelly's team have reached the Alaskan coast. He had the last report from Marc a week ago in Slovakia."

Sam looked at Dean. "And Cas said that the tablet's keeper was Gadriel?"

Dean nodded. "Camael killed him before he got the location." He looked sharply at Metatron, sitting silently by the hearth. "You got anything to add?"

The angel shrugged. "I gave the tablets to the Qaddiysh as I was instructed. Sariel was the keeper for the Angel tablet, Amaros for the tablets, Leviathan and Behemoth. Gadriel was chosen keeper for the tablet of the Dark Mother's creations. Kokabiel was the keeper for the Demon tablet. That's all I can tell you. I don't know where they hid them, or how they were shielded."

"What about the last scion?" Katherine said, looking at him. "How exactly did that come about as a prophecy?"

Metatron smiled ruefully. "After we spoke of this, I did recall some mention of such a prophecy in the texts in the library of Heaven. I never had a chance to verify them or even discover their source, they were older even than my tenure as Scribe, written by the previous Voice. I suspect it's possible that someone read them and passed the information on, to someone on this plane. The texts that I found here, in Rome, suggested that. Not so much a prophecy as a message. But as I said, I couldn't verify them."

Dean saw Sam's eyes narrow at the scribe as he spoke. His brother didn't trust the angel, he realised belatedly. It wasn't all that surprising given Sam's previous encounters with most of the angels, but he'd thought that Sam would've given the benefit of doubt to Metatron.

"Cas said that he found something else in the library," he said, his gaze going back to the scribe. "And that Reuma confirmed it. He said that the story of the last of the bloodline was only a possibility for something called the Sentinel. Did you know about that?"

What the angel had told him was that Metatron had signed a re-written a section of the prophecy or message or whatever the story had been on the last scion, and the new text that had apparently been added suggested that the living scion was the one who could bring the power of the tablets together. He watched as Metatron's face smoothed out.

"The Sentinel was only ever a rumour in Heaven," the scribe said after a moment. "It was, I believe, the reason that Lucifer was overcome by pride in the face of our Father's commandment about Adam."

"Why?" Ellen asked curiously. "What was supposed to happen?"

Metatron sighed softly, his gaze dropping to his hands in his lap. "The rumour began that God would choose a human, to guard over the planes. The archangels, and specifically Lucifer and Raphael, considered that their job. I don't know where that rumour started or by whom, it just seemed to start circulating in the final years of humanity's evolution, as the early populations were beginning to spread north and east."

Dean glanced at his brother, Sam's eyes flicking to him at the same time.

"To guard over the planes?" Jerome asked, leaning forward. "For what purpose?"

Metraton looked up at him. "The rumour stated that this – human – would be the wielder of the power of God, and would keep the worlds in balance, would be guardian over all of His Creations."

"You doubt the rumour?" Katherine asked, catching the odd hesitation in the angel's words.

The scribe shrugged. "The tablets were written to enable humanity to take care of themselves, when they had reached a certain level of maturity," he said lightly. "To enable them to close off the other planes entirely, no longer needing the salvation of Heaven nor the temptation of Hell to test their collective character. What need then would humanity have for a guardian, I am forced to ask myself? From a rational perspective, it didn't seem to have a purpose."

"Unless God wasn't planning on coming back?" Felix said softly from the end of the table.

The angel's head turned slowly to look at him. "I suppose that would be a possibility," he conceded.

* * *

><p>Dean walked slowly up the iron stairs to the door, Sam a half-a-step behind him.<p>

"He's lying," he said in a low voice to Sam.

"I think so too," Sam agreed, stopping as they reached the door. "Why?"

"I don't know, but he knows a helluva more about those stories than he's letting on," Dean said, opening the locking rings. "Those books he brought along with him," he continued over the thud of the locks. "Anyone had a chance to look at them?"

Sam shook his head. "Mariana told Marla that he said those were what the order had to see, but they're written in Enochian. Not even Chuck can read them properly."

"Can we get them?"

"Without him finding out?" Sam asked, stepping out into the frigid air with his brother. "Doubt it."

Dean looked up at the sky, clear for once and almost white-blue. "Cas wanted to meet him," he said thoughtfully, turning around to face Sam. "Guess we'll have to figure the how and when."

"He'll baulk."

"Probably," Dean said, grinning suddenly. "That's the bit we'll have to figure out."

"When are you coming back here?" Sam looked over the concrete well at the truck parked next to it.

"I don't know," Dean said. "With Vince dead and Kelly gone, I'm trying to pick up the training. I could use your help," he added, glancing sideways at him.

"I'll come over tomorrow," Sam agreed. "Not sure how much time I can give you, Adam's supposed to be coming back at the end of the week."

"That was quick," Dean commented. "What's he going to do here?"

"I thought it might be an idea if he thought about becoming a legacy," Sam said, watching his brother's face. He was a little surprised when Dean nodded.

"What about you?"

"What about me?" Sam asked, brow creasing up.

"You going down that road too?"

"Uh, maybe, later," he hedged. "When we're not up to our armpits trying to figure out how to save the world again."

"Think that'll ever happen?" Dean asked, glancing back at the open door behind them. "How's Marla?"

"Good," Sam said, wondering what his brother was trying to get out. "They're both good."

"You gonna stick with that?"

Sam ducked his head. "I think so."

He looked up to find Dean smiling a one-sided smile at him. "What?"

"Considering the amount of advice you've shovelled at me, I thought you'd be a lot more … definite … about it," Dean said with a shrug.

Sam made a face. "Our whole world is indefinite at the moment."

"True enough," Dean agreed, turning away. "See you tomorrow."

"Yeah."

Sam turned back and walked through the door, waiting until he heard the truck door slam and the engine start up before he pulled the door shut and closed the rings. He should be more definite about it, he thought, turning back to the gallery and the stairs. Living with them was a taste of normality he hadn't experienced since college, even more so than then with Marla's son, Jean, a part of his life now.

It wasn't doubt. At least not doubt about her, or his feelings. Maybe he didn't really think he and Dean would get through whatever was coming at them next, he considered, his boots clanging softly on the steps. That was a part of it. The other part was that his older brother was in limbo with Alex, he realised, stopping halfway down the stairs and staring into space. He didn't want to make anything permanent until he knew that was going to be resolved. The abrupt self-knowledge brought a derisory smile to his face. It was the sort of randomly chivalrous standpoint his brother might've taken.

* * *

><p><em><strong>West Keep, Kansas<strong>_

There were pieces everywhere, Dean thought, dropping wearily onto the sofa in the office and tipping his head back, and he couldn't make any of them fit.

What the fuck was the story with the former scribe of Heaven? The sense he'd had, listening to the angel and hearing, not so much lies, as omissions … and evasions … had been strong, his alarm bells going off one after the other. He needed to talk to Cas, he realised with misgiving. They were going to need his help to get some kind of background on these so-called texts that existed both in Heaven and on earth. So much for trying to avoid getting entangled with the angels.

Then there were the weather anomalies and the movement of the monsters. Did those two connect? They had to, he thought, leaning forward and staring at the opposite wall. Wendigo didn't hunt in packs, but he'd seen three together. Wolves didn't pack up beyond family groups, but he'd seen hundreds gathered to hunt. Hunt what? He still couldn't figure that one out. He couldn't think how that could possibly relate to the cold either, but it had started happening as the winters had gotten worse.

Far down in the deep reaches of his memory something stirred, a distant association. He waited for it, trying to clear his mind and let it float up but it remained stubbornly hidden and he gave up, rubbing both hands over his face in frustration as he stood up and started to pace across the room.

Jane had told them that the alpha vamp had taken the women and a small group of men and had vanished. But Tilly had found survivors that new fangs were feeding from. So chances were the alpha was around and hunting out as many unprotected survivors as possible. Wraiths were moving out of the shallow bogs and marshes, maybe he considered abruptly, because the shallower bodies of water were freezing solid now? He couldn't verify that, but he filed it away as a possibility to get Jo or Ty to check out in Michigan. Probably the other kinds were moving as well. They hadn't heard anything of shapeshifters, from any of their people who'd gone out on survivor searches or supply runs, or from anyone at Michigan, but that could only be a matter of time, he thought. And then there were the croats.

Pestilence hadn't said anything about the virus when he'd trapped him and taken the ring, he was sure of it. Bobby and Jerome had been speculating that the virus would continue to mutate, and it seemed to have done that, but to what purpose? The Horsemen had been the outriders of the end of days, Lucifer's personal vanguard to remove the bulk of humanity from the planet before he got started. But even Death and Baal hadn't been able to exterminate humanity completely.

They were going to have to grab one, he knew, grab it and test it until they'd figured it out. Jackson and Riley had already put on extra guards, warning them of the dangers and what to do if a stranger or group wandered in, looking not quite right, but it was as risky as hell for their populations if one slipped by.

This whole gig had been so much easier when it was just Lucifer he'd had to kill. The thought slid through the others and he sat down, shaking his head at it, at himself.

Metatron turning up. Camael killing the Qaddiysh and looking for the tablets. The Grigori, still around, even if they were on the other side of the world. Prophecies of a mortal, the last of the bloodline of Christ, no less, who could find the tablets and control them. A rumour in Heaven of a human to guard everything, who would wield the power of God. Or was that just another ploy of Heaven's to get everyone wound up and agitated over nothing?

He stopped and looked around the room. It was cheerless and silent.

"_What is it about me that you need so much?"_

"_You take the weight away," he'd answered._

When the memory of what had happened with Zoe had come back, in a rush of loosely-connected fragments, it'd been that piece of conversation that had hurt the worst and had driven the fury he'd been unable to hold back when he'd realised what she'd done. He hadn't told Alex that. He'd wished he had, along with a million other things, but he hadn't had the chance.

He turned around abruptly and headed for the bathroom.

* * *

><p>Alex opened the apartment door and the thoughts of monsters and weather and angels that had followed him up the stairs vanished as he looked down at her, not knowing until that second exactly how much he'd wanted to be here.<p>

"Hey, is it, uh, too late to help out?" he asked, looking down as his voice broke high and clearing his throat self-consciously.

"No," she said, stepping back and opening the door wider. "It's good. Shoes off."

"What?"

"Take your boots off," she said and he looked down at her sock-clad feet. "They're crawling and anything that's on the floor goes into their mouths and they don't need more nutrition from the mud you've been walking around in."

"Oh." He dropped to one knee and unlaced his boots quickly, pulling them off and leaving them next to the door. "I thought they didn't start crawling for another few months?"

Alex glanced over her shoulder at him. "All different, apparently, but six months is about the right time. How was Michigan?" she asked as she bent to pick up Evie from the hall, carrying her into the living room and depositing her back on the thick soft rug in front of the sofa.

"Cold," he said uncertainly, his eyes fixed to the floor which seemed to have a lot more obstacles than it'd had two weeks ago.

Following his gaze, Alex's mouth quirked to one side. "Sorry about the mess, I clean up when they go down. Did you get what you had to do done?"

_Had he?_ It hadn't felt like a particularly productive trip, but he guessed he had. "Yeah, mostly. Opened up a whole lotta other stuff, but that's how it goes," he said.

"I talked to Jerome," she said, as he hovered next to the sofa, looking down at the two infants on the floor in front of him. "I thought it sounded interesting."

"Huh."

"Sit down, they'll notice you in a minute," Alex said, dropping gracefully to sit cross-legged on the floor next to James. The baby was sitting up on his own, his tiny hands squeezing the crap out of an already limp rag doll, Dean noticed. "He said he'll send some of the background stuff to what they're working on."

"Who said?" Dean looked at her, and back down as Evie found his foot.

"Jerome." She smiled at the wary astonishment on his face. "I'll tell you about it later."

"Okay," he said distractedly, shifting his foot back a little as Evie attempted to grab it.

"You can pick her up, you know."

He reached down and picked up Evie carefully, lifting her onto his lap. As soon as she saw his face, her mouth opened and her eyes widened at him, her expression half-comical surprise, half-smiling recognition.

"You've done this before."

He looked at her, a brow lifted slightly at the droll tone in her voice, knowing she wasn't referring to the child he held. "A long time ago. I took care of Sam when Dad wasn't around."

"You don't seem resentful," she said, not quite making it a question.

Watching Evie find a button on his shirt and drool over it, Dean shook his head. "It was my responsibility, taking care of him," he said pragmatically. "I, uh, messed up a few times."

"You were a child too."

"No," he said quietly. "I wasn't, not really."

He hadn't been. Not really. He'd pretended to be, sometimes, with the other kids in the many schools; with his brother, when the load had felt too heavy. He'd tried to imagine what a life growing up with a normal childhood would be like. In his mind, it was always like one of those early family TV shows, a house that was always there, a mother who was always ready to listen with pie and cookies and a glass of milk on the table after school. A father, coming home from work and coaching the team and cooking barbeque in the back yard. The sort of problems that could be solved in a single twenty-minute episode. No guns. No salt. No monsters. He'd known it wasn't like that for most of the kids he'd met in those years. A lot of them had just one parent, not because of death but through divorce or desertion. No milk and cookies, just a latch-key and a note on the table about dinner in the oven, or a few bucks to get some take-away. At the time, he'd felt vaguely superior to those kids. At least his life had had a purpose.

Lifting his head and looking at her, he remembered that her childhood had been missing a mother as well.

"It wasn't all bad," he said, the memory of what she'd said to him, after he'd been turned and turned back, rising in his thoughts. "I just don't know who I'd've been if it'd been different."

Or what he'd've been. A normal kid. A normal man. A cheap, two-bit hood with a half a dozen addictions and no idea of what to do with his life? Or a responsible father, taking care of a family and a mortgage? He couldn't figure it.

Alex nodded and picked up James in a smooth movement as he threw the doll aside. She settled them both in the armchair, unbuttoning her shirt. "Could you run a shallow bath for them?"

* * *

><p>Dean watched her as she got them ready for bed, into clean, warm suits, their laughter high, fluting in the small room as she talked to them and tickled them and focussed her full attention on them. She didn't seem to be uncomfortable or non-maternal with them, he thought. She seemed to be perfectly relaxed, unworried about spills or drips, sensing mood shifts before they occurred and changing tactics easily. He got up as she lifted James, taking him from her and following her as she walked down the hall and into the bedroom with Evie in her arms.<p>

They were growing faster than he'd thought possible. In his memories, Sam had been a baby for a long time and then had just jumped into being a little boy, with no interim process. He felt a small glow of resentment that he couldn't just watch them do that, that soon; too soon, he'd have to go south and find a monster and kill it, deal with the other things, the machinations of Heaven and manipulations of creatures who wanted the people he was protecting.

Leaning back against the door frame, he was surprised at the feeling. Even at its worst, chased up and down the country by angels and demons and his brother lying to him most of the time, he'd felt a sense of purpose to what he did, a need for it, a steady satisfaction that he could do it, and do it well. He watched Alex tuck in the quilt around them, and lean over to turn down the light and he backed out of the doorway as she pulled the door almost closed behind her, careful to leave her plenty of room.

Returning to the living room, he wondered how to say what he wanted to say. There was still a tension between them, symptomatic of the fear he thought they were both feeling. He remembered what they'd had and he needed it back, but there was nothing he could do to make that happen. Nothing at all.

He followed her into the kitchen as she turned that way, leaning against the table as she opened the fridge door and began to pull vegetables out. She was halfway through chopping them up when he realised what she was doing and that he was just standing there, watching her.

"Can I help with that?" he asked, walking to the counter beside her.

She looked at him, one brow rising and her eyes crinkling a little in a way he knew well. "Heard you were pretty good with a knife?"

He smiled back at her, one side of his mouth lifting a little higher than the other. "Sounds like you doubt it?"

"Steak's in the fridge," she said, with a soft huff at the smile.

Standing close to her, the long knife slicing easily through the tender meat, he cast a sideways glance at her. The tension had gone, he thought, wondering exactly how that happened. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, he told himself. The knife could use sharpening though.

* * *

><p>He sat on one end of the sofa, she sat on the other, one leg tucked under her as she looked at him. "So you think that this angel, Metatron, is lying?"<p>

"I don't know if he's lying," Dean prevaricated, picking up his glass. "I just don't think we're getting the whole story."

"Can you see a reason for it?"

He stared at the whiskey, his expression souring. "Twist us around, have us chasing our tails while Heaven gets on with whatever it's trying to do?"

"And the other angel, Castiel, he said that someone's been behind the planning the whole time but he doesn't think it was the archangels?"

"Yeah."

"Do you have the hierarchies of the angels in Heaven?" Alex asked curiously. "Or does the order?"

He looked over the rim of his glass at her, his eyes thoughtful as he followed her train of thought. "The order does."

"Maybe we could eliminate some possibilities?"

"Maybe we could," he agreed slowly, thinking about what Jerome had said of the angelologies held there.

This is what he'd missed, along with everything else, he thought with an inward sigh. He missed just talking through his thoughts with her, watching her deconstruct them, give him a different perspective, an outlook he hadn't considered, a bunch of different directions he could follow up.

In the small hearth, the flames crackled cheerfully, warmth and peace spreading through the room. He'd missed this too, he thought. This feeling of a home, of a normality, probably illusory, that nevertheless was comforting.

"I'm sorry," she said into the silence, her gaze meeting his. "About what happened, before. I didn't mean to hurt you."

He shook his head, setting the glass back on the low table. He didn't want an apology for something that had been out of her control, out of both of their control.

"That wasn't your fault," he told her.

"I thought you might not come back."

He looked down, chewing on the corner of his lip. It'd hurt, enough to keep him from being able to come up the stairs for a few days, at least. Not enough to keep him away for good.

"It didn't occur to me, until later, after you'd gone," she continued, her voice a little strained. "That … maybe … I'd been so scared because it might have been a way back –" She looked up, her gaze meeting his. "– to where I could remember you."

The words fell into him and their meaning slowly percolated through him. _Try again_. He looked away, feeling his pulse accelerate, a flush of heat bringing a thin sweat to his palms. _Try again_. Was that what she was asking?

The silence stretched out and Alex turned her head away, looking at the fire. "Were we happy?"

Dean swallowed uncomfortably. He was good at a lot of things, very good at some. This … this wasn't one of them. She hadn't asked him how he'd felt, before. And he hadn't told her. And that had been a mistake, one he'd regretted bitterly when he'd thought there was no possible way of fixing it, making it right, of ever having the chance again.

"I was," he said, forcing himself to admit it, to get it out. "I thought you were."

He'd been happy and contented to a point he'd barely been able to recognise, he thought, watching her. Clearing his throat, he wanted to tell her that, wanted to get that straight, at least.

"I – uh – it took a long time, to, uh, get there," he started, stumbling over the words. "I mean, we were in the middle of a war, and trying to get, uh, Hell, shut down, and you were, um, worried about being pregnant – and all the other stuff –" He exhaled softly, his discomfort with trying to explain how it'd been for them warring with a compelling desire that he make it clear, this time. "I didn't think …"

He stopped, licking the dryness from his lips. "For a long time, I was kind of shut down, not wanting to be close to anyone. At first, it wasn't really deliberate, just the way things were."

When they'd gone down to Cape Girardeau, him and Sam, and he'd seen Cassie again, it'd changed him. Released him, he'd thought at the time. He'd thought for a long time that he'd loved her, but as they'd driven away he'd realised that she'd been right. There hadn't been any hope for them because whatever that'd been, need or want, it hadn't been strong enough to not make excuses, not strong enough to last. And he'd thought that it was proof, of a kind, that he couldn't look for that again, couldn't hope for it, because the life, his life, would never have enough room for what he'd felt he'd wanted.

"I told her that I'd be back, but I never did go back. After a while, I didn't even think of her anymore," he told Alex, swallowing a mouthful of whiskey, and trying to remember how that'd happened, that gradual dissipation of feeling, of memories. He remembered deleting her number, from his phone. "I stopped – I tried to stop wanting anything, when I realised that."

In Cicero, going to see Lisa, all he'd wanted was an uncomplicated weekend of sex. It'd been Ben that had held him there, the possibility of having a son, of being a father, of having a family of his own. He'd known, but hadn't acknowledged, even when she'd offered that life and he'd turned it down, that Lise had been a part of the package, and that was all. Living with her, at Chitaqua, had brought that up again, and by then he'd convinced himself that he couldn't have more. That he didn't deserve more. She hadn't loved him, no matter what she'd said. She hadn't known him. At all, really.

"Everyone I cared about, even the people I just let get close, they left or they died," he said. "I didn't know how to think about it. It felt like it was meant, that it wasn't the life, it was me."

His feelings for Alex had snuck up on him. She'd infiltrated his defences, his walls, without even trying, he'd thought. Snuck in with a wry sense of humour, and a pragmatic practicality and secrets of her own. And a quiet about her that had given him peace and a smile that he couldn't get out of his head. When he'd told her about Sam and Hell and what it'd done and what he'd done, he'd thought that would be the end of it, that she would see him differently. She hadn't. By the time he'd really admitted how he'd felt, he'd been so far gone he would've done anything to have her with him. Anything at all.

"I knew then, if Death didn't bring you back … I wasn't – I'd change – you know, stop caring about anything. Become the monster." He picked up his glass, swallowing the last mouthful. "There were times, wearing the medallion, I didn't feel human. Things I did, that I thought and felt, that weren't."

"But you never crossed that line, even on your own," she said softly to him.

He shook his head. "I did. I came back from it, but I crossed it." He lifted his head and looked at her. "I came back because of what you gave me."

The Grigori's face rose in his mind's eye, the memory of pain and blood and that rasping voice telling him how she'd died. And the silence in his mind when it'd all gone away and she'd shown him what he had to do.

"Even after," he hesitated, repressing the memories. "After I thought you were gone," he continued. "That didn't leave me, what I'd felt, that didn't go away. I tried to bury it," he said, with a soft, deprecating snort at his futile attempts of doing that. "Didn't work real well."

"Is that why you're afraid of me?" Alex asked.

"Not afraid of _you_," he said, leaning toward her, wondering if he could make her understand. What terrified him was the way it'd felt, when he lost her. The way he thought it would always feel if he couldn't get this right or if it happened again.

"I just – I don't think I can –" he stopped, wetting his lips nervously. _You can tell her this_, he said to himself. _You can tell her, you _have_ to tell her this_.

"My whole life," he started again. "Was taking care of Sam, making sure that he was okay, that nothing happened to him." He shook his head slightly. "Plenty happened to him, stuff I couldn't prevent, couldn't stop, but I felt like it, it was my job, my responsibility to protect him as much as I could."

"Then, I left him alone." He shrugged. "It seemed safer that way, at the time. Wasn't, of course, but I thought it was."

He looked back at Alex. "I never wanted to make that mistake with you, but I did anyway, I left and …"

Alex saw the depths of his pain then, out in the open, filling his eyes. Merrin had told her about that day, and she'd remembered the attack. Remembered the tracer fire across the sky. Remembered the little boy who'd touched her.

"You didn't know," she said gently.

"I should've known," he countered, his mouthing twisting and his gaze falling. "It was Cas and I trusted in him when I shouldn't have. I should've been here."

She felt her heart contract sharply in her chest. "Jerome said that you had something to do with destiny, Dean," she said, reaching out to take his hand. "That you changed things, but that things also centred on you, you and Sam."

"That makes it worse," he said, repressing a shiver at the feel of her fingers, firm around his. "Maybe … maybe I'm the one who brings this crap down on everyone else."

"No."

He looked up at the complete assuredness of her answer. "What makes you so sure?"

"I don't know," she said, shaking her head helplessly. "I don't know why but I'm sure of it. Maybe it's because you're the one who makes it right, in the end?"

It wasn't what had been there, that look in her face, in her eyes, but it was closer, so much closer to it and it pulled at him, filled him with a unnamed, unlooked-at longing he'd held onto even when there'd been no reason to hold on at all. He moved a lot more slowly this time, sliding close to her, giving her time to move away, to move back.

"You sure about this?"

"No," she said, smiling nervously as she looked into his eyes. "I just want to try."

_Try again_, he thought, his fingertips slipping over her cheek, sliding into her hair as he leaned closer.

The scent of her skin and her hair, so familiar and unchanged, filled his senses first and he felt his heart jump against his ribs, that thundery, shivery feeling rippling through him. He could feel her trembling as he brushed his lips over hers, a tremor that seemed to go from her right through him, his eyes screwing shut with the sensations that were rocketing along his nerves. He felt her breath, uneven and warm against his skin as he moved closer, his mouth grazing along the line of her jaw, slipping under it and barely whispering over the sensitive skin of her neck, tentative and unsure of himself, hoping he was doing the right thing. He felt her heartbeat against his lips, pounding furiously through the thin skin there, reminding him that no matter what he thought, they were still in uncharted territory. Hadn't been here before, not like this.

She turned her head a little and her lips met his. Between them, it'd always been like this, he wanted to say to her. Always too much. Too fast. Too full of emotion. He'd never been able to keep hold of himself, of any kind of control over what happened. It'd always been instinctive and always been a long way beyond what he'd known before.

* * *

><p><em><strong>Little Diomede Island, Bering Strait, Alaska<strong>_

Kelly stopped on the ice, looking at the flat-topped hump of island ahead of them. The village had given them food and directions, a light sled to schlep their gear along and a warning.

"What's that noise?" Danielle asked, looking over the empty white snow and ice.

"Bergs," he told her shortly. "Grinding on the shelf."

"What?" Jack looked at him incredulously.

He shrugged and gestured to the north. "You saw the bay at Inuvik."

"But that's a level drop of more than three hundred feet–"

"Yeah," Kelly cut him off, looking at the island. "We'll stop here for the night. Ukaleq said there was a village on the western side, back in the day. It was still there in summer, might find something to help us out for the crossing tomorrow."

They followed him across the ice and around the snow-filled, steep rocky sides of the island, the grinding of the icebergs hitting the continental land-bridge that the islands were a part of a constant and nerve-wracking reminder that something was happening, here in the north.

Of the fifty or so small buildings that had once been Little Diomede village, only two remained, steel and concrete impervious to the disasters that had overtaken the more lightly built homes. Kelly and Jack searched the closer, smaller building as Danielle and Perry watched their surroundings, then they set up their tents and sleeping bags in the largest central room, scavenging for materials to burn.

* * *

><p>Kelly stood in the darkness, watching the northern lights crackle and shimmer across the twilight sky. He had a feeling that getting or transmitting a radio signal would be a lost cause from here on in. The persistent hiss of static on his hand-held SSB, even after the aurora borealis had faded and disappeared, bore that out.<p>

Behind him, the door to the building slammed and he heard the squeak and crunch of footsteps coming up the stairs.

"Any luck?" Danielle asked, pulling her coat more closely around her face.

"No," he said, glancing at her. "Didn't expect it really."

"What did you think of the story in the village?"

He thought back to the packed snowhouse they'd stayed in the night before, warm and stinking with the scents of whale fat and seal flesh and sweat, loud with the number of people crowded into its interior. The leader had welcomed them, and they'd shared stories through the night, of what had been happening in the south, and of what had occurred in the north. Late in the night, an older man, his skin wizened and weathered, had sat next to the fire in the hushed space and had told them about Sedna, and her messengers of ice and wind and fury, sent out to tell the animals of the sea and land it was time to move on, to move away from the north before the winter of dreams settled in and ice covered the land.

Ukaleq had told him later that the tale was as old as the People. Kelly thought it bore some resemblance to the Nordic myths of the end of the world, of Ragnarök and Fenrir eating the sun.

"It's a good story," he said to the young woman. "And they've seen those things, those messengers. Maybe way back when, someone saw them before as well."

"The last time the planet was in glaciation was thirty thousand years ago," she said, brow creasing up as she wondered if that's what he was talking about.

Kelly nodded. His native home's mythology shared something with the Norse mythology as well, and others, across the globe. When the pillars of Yggdrasil, in the Norse, and the sacred oak of the druids of the Celts and Gauls, fell, it would be the end of the world. He wondered if those prophecies were foretelling Heaven's Second War. He'd noticed that mythology had a way of repeating, around the world, in different lands and cultures, even when those cultures themselves were completely different from each other. He didn't believe in coincidence either.

Turning away from the strait, he gestured to her to go back. "I don't know what's going on, Dan," he said, his voice muffled in the furs that surrounded the hood of his jacket. "We got a job to do and the strait's frozen solid, right the way across. We'll be on the Chukchi Peninsula tomorrow."

Russia, he thought with a slightly disbelieving snort into the furs. Was it as empty now as it had been ten years ago, the last time he'd been there? He didn't want to bet on it. Not people, maybe, but other things might've moved in.

* * *

><p><em><strong>Heaven<strong>_

Gabriel looked around the plain room, his gaze finally coming to rest on the Power that stood to one side.

"This was not where I expected to find you, Zephon," the archangel said, gesturing at the room.

"It has been a long time since I desired the trappings that the others find so addictive, Gabriel," Zephon said quietly. He stood a little shorter than Gabriel, and his hair, long and iron-grey, was bound simply at the nape of his neck. His wings were feathered in shades of grey, from smoke to charcoal, bottom to top.

"But your standing …" Gabriel said, brows drawing together slightly. "You should be in the Fourth Tower, Zephon, not living with the students and soldiers."

"This is my choice," Zephon said. "And I don't suppose it is the reason for your seeking me out?"

"No," Gabriel said, pushing aside his puzzlement with the angel's choices. "No, I need to ask you about the library, and about Metatron."

"Well, there's a topic from the past. Two thousand years since I've been asked about Metatron, Gabriel," Zephon said. He made a short, economical gesture to the unadorned pallet to one side of the room. "Sit, and ask."

"You trained Metatron, when you chose to leave the library," Gabriel said, sitting on the pallet and looking at the older angel who took a seat at the opposite end.

"I did," Zephon agreed. "What did you want to know?"

Gabriel looked around the room and shook his head. "I'm not sure. Was he devout? Was his Faith strong? Did you ever sense that he could be capable of treason?"

He watched Zephon's brows rise. "Those are serious accusations, Gabriel."

"I know," the archangel said with a long exhale. "The manipulations, of the archangels and of the lines of destiny, of the bloodlines of the _Irin_ – you know, as well as any of us, that it did not take just power but also skill and knowledge. There are very, very few who fit the requirements."

"I thought you were chasing Camael in this matter?"

Gabriel huffed humourlessly. "Camael is not sufficiently capable in any of the prerequisites for this plan."

"But you believe Metatron might be?" Zephon studied him, the golden-grey eyes slightly narrowed as the arch nodded. He drew in a breath. "He was a strong student, had no problem with understanding the position or of proving his Faith," he said, steepling his fingers under his chin. Gabriel glanced at the gesture and back to the angel's face. "He was proud of his accomplishments, but then we all were, to one extent or another, proud of ourselves, of what we did, in those days. He had determination and the intelligence to foresee consequence, not of small actions but also of larger ones. His Faith was complete, and I did not see sufficient arrogance in him to imagine that he could commit treason against Heaven, Gabriel."

"He has modified some of the older works," the archangel said. "The ones that talked about the power of the scion of the Lamb and the prophecy of the Sentinel."

"Those were before his time," Zephon said, frowning at the thought. "A long time before his time."

"Yes, but they bear his sigil and with careful examination, the editing is plain, the original text has been removed completely."

"What did he change?"

"He suggested that the last scion was the probable wielder of the Word, in the oldest texts that foretold the bloodline," Gabriel said. "And he changed the prophecy of the Sentinel to reflect the same conclusions."

"This you know, that Mary was chosen ten thousand years before the son of God was born," Zephon said consideringly. "That the bloodline was guided to the correct woman at the correct time."

Gabriel nodded. Most of Heaven was privy to the knowledge.

"The descendants were not considered," Zephon said, waving a hand dismissively at the idea. "He was never supposed to have had any, the conjunctions were too great. Too much strain on the DNA strand of the creations."

"But he did," Gabriel said slowly. "Two lines."

"Yes, he did," Zephon said tiredly. "Both were considered to have died out before this millennium."

"Is that a fact? Do we know it for certain?"

"No. At the time, the persecutions and the paranoia that followed the plague and signs after Moloch's gate opened briefly in Kyrgyzstan, meant that we could not check on the lines. It only took two years to kill off nearly two hundred million people from the Asian continent across the deserts and into the European land-mass, and after that the Church became extremely involved in the politics of the regions that had been devastated. We had no means of verifying the living and the dead, save those who came to us after."

"So, either or both could have survived."

"Theoretically. No child born down there has shown the mark or the abilities of the lines since, however." Zephon shrugged.

"Why would Metatron have changed the prophecy of the Sentinel to include the bloodlines of the scion of the Lamb?"

"To confuse those who might be searching for answers?" Zephon shook his head. "I do not know, Gabriel. I wrote the prophecy from our Father's Word myself. When the creations were ready, one would be chosen to stand guard. He would have the power of the Word in his hands and the balance had to be kept. That was all there was to it. What has been changed?"

"There was something written after and then erased," Gabriel said, his wings rustling in frustration. "It was skilfully done, so skilfully that I immediately thought of Metatron."

"But there was nothing there," Zephon insisted. "I know that. Did he write something and remove it, as a further means of confusion?"

"That is what I need to discover," Gabriel told him, getting to his feet. "I will come again to see you if I may, when I have more information."

The Power smiled wryly. "As you can see, there is not much to occupy me these days. I would be honoured to assist if I can."

Gabriel inclined his head and turned, striding from the room, and Zephon waved a hand toward the door, the doorway disappearing as the archangel passed through.

* * *

><p><em><strong>Chambres d'Ombres, Pyrenees Mountains, France<strong>_

"Alain, we cannot reach Caitlin."

Alain looked up from the screen he was watching and turned to look at Michel, the tall, lanky programmer bent almost double over the console as he tapped in another set of commands.

"Weather?"

"No," Michel said shortly, scowling as the screen came up yet again with a connection failure message. "They haven't been responding for three days now."

"What do you have on telemetry?"

"Nothing, everything shut down."

"Do we have the satellite data for the region?" Alain glanced across the room to the other row of screens.

"Yes, but we can't see anything," Michel said, gesturing vaguely behind him. "The cloud cover has been persistent since the day before the link went down."

"How long have they been offline before?"

"Never more than twenty-four hours," Michel told him, moving around to another keyboard, typing and looking over his shoulder at the situation table at the same time. "That was just a hardware failure and they got back –"

"What?" Alain stood up and walked over to him, looking over his shoulder.

On the screen, a blinking cursor sat at the end of a line of text.

_Phoenix Four to Phoenix One, sorry about the downtime, back and running now. Angus._

Michel stared at the screen, frowning. He leaned forward and typed a message.

_Phoenix One to Phoenix Four, glad to hear it was just a four-oh-seven._

"Four-oh-seven?" Alain looked at him curiously.

On the screen, another line appeared.

_Negative, Phoenix One, we did not take time out for nookie. Some terns decided the hard line to the uplink would make good nest lining and it took us thirty-six hours to find something that would substitute._

"A test?" Alain read the line. "Why?"

Michel shrugged, typing a response. "It was worrying me."

_Can't be too careful. Shoot the damned birds next time._

"They passed?"

The programmer nodded, turning away from the screen. "There are only four chapters left, I am not being too careful."

Alain nodded. "No, you are not."

* * *

><p><em><strong>West Keep, Kansas<strong>_

Alex closed her eyes, her back arching up with his touch, images flickering in and out of the darkness of her closed lids faster than she could keep up with them. It was familiar, yet it wasn't, this electrifying intimacy between them. He knew her, every trigger, every flashpoint on her body, and that was both reassuring and discomforting, more so that she knew the same about him, without knowing how.

It was too much. She couldn't stop shaking, couldn't damp down the need at all, her body thrumming and jangling, but she couldn't tell him to stop either. Amidst the cacophony of sensation that was inundating her nervous system, she caught glimpses of him, not here and now, but then and before, and each one she searched and tried to hold onto, tried to get a connection with others, her concentration shot to hell but more of the flashes appearing as arousal deepened and opened her up.

He was as nervous as she was, she thought. His breath caught and hitched and he would stop, eyes shut tightly, panting softly against her skin, would look at her, watch her, whisper to her to tell him if she couldn't go on. He was going slowly but it felt fast, she shuddered deeply as his fingers grazed over her.

_A smile, genuine, wide, his face lit by the headlights reflecting off the snow, behind him, the sky was black, filled with a backwash of stars. In front of them, spread out like groups of precious stones on black velvet, thousands of lights, coloured and flashing and brilliant against the darkness._

She dragged in a breath as he moved up, skin sliding over skin and his scent filling her nose, a clean male scent, a trace of whiskey on his breath, just a bare hint of gun oil and solvent on his skin, underlaid by a deeper musk.

_The dawn light had come through the window behind her. His eyes had widened, the dark green irises lightening, his recognition of what she'd just discovered filling them. For a moment it had seemed like the world had stopped dead, then she'd lost her courage when he hadn't said anything at all and she'd pulled on her gloves and left._

"Alex …" he breathed against the point of her jaw, not quite a question, not quite a plea.

She opened her eyes and looked into his, dark and slightly unfocussed and asking her wordlessly and she slid her arms around him, drawing him closer, skin to skin, his eyelids fluttering shut with the unspoken answer.

Had it been more than this? This _needwantyearning_ that filled every cell and burned through her as his arm curled under her back?

_Coated in fine dust, his grin white against a sunburned face, head thrown back and his laughter loud in the hot sunshine, standing on the stubble field. Brows drawn together, head leaning on his hand, reading at the table in the apartment, looking up, his expression softening to a rueful smile. A blur of movement as he spins the wrench in his fingers, leaning on the side of the open engine bay, light catching the shining metal and flashing over his face._

_Worry. Tenderness. A bright anger that had burned in his eyes_.

Deep inside her and every movement built on the last, sensation on sensation and a jittering impatience through muscle and nerve and blood. She lifted her hips and felt the reverberation in his chest, a gusting exhale and a long tremor that oscillated through him and through her.

_Laughter and contemplation and compassion and a fear that lurked sometimes behind his expressions, as if he were waiting for something, wanting something he didn't think he could ever get._

Her arms tightened around him, every muscle contracting in response.

"Dean …" she breathed, shaking inside and out.

* * *

><p>He felt her squeezing around him and fell with her. The first time all over again, nervous and hypersensitive and he couldn't get this wrong, familiar and unknown mixed together, no control, nothing but an amped up desire and an unnamed and desperately wanted yearning coiling through him and his chest and throat tight with it.<p>

Did you _remember_? Remember _us_? Remember _me_? He wanted to ask but couldn't, the words jammed up in the tightness of his throat, his body shaking and twitching with the aftershocks, his thoughts chaotic with feeling and memory. He held onto the feel of her arms around him and waited.

Her eyes flew open and she stared past him, pupils dilated hugely, lashes trembling as she sucked in a deep breath and he lifted his weight off her.

* * *

><p><em>Think there's anywhere left that's a bit more private?<em> Happiness, he'd looked happy. _You'd rather have a head-case than someone without all the scars –?_ Doubt and uncertainty and that underlying fear, he couldn't quite believe what she'd told him. _There are three thousand pregnant women in the camps? _He hadn't seen the deep reflexive hurt in her. _Did you know that Jo was pregnant?_ Pragmatic and a little irritated, as if Jo had done it on purpose. _Alex! Come on! Please. Let me in._ She'd heard the anger under the plea, and she remembered, remembered feeling that things would escalate out of control if she let him in_. I need you to be somewhere safe_. Whispered against her ear, the golden glow of the library lights shadowing his eyes and his voice filled with an emotion he'd never named. _I'll figure out another way_. Skin to skin, his arms around her and this time his voice filled with certainty, making a promise.

He hadn't kept the promise but she knew he'd tried.

"Alex?"

The memories were clear and sharp, filling in some of the gaps, and the yearning, the grief that rose without warning or explanation sometimes were understood. _I do, you know_, she heard her voice say in a small, quiet room, the sky lightening to the east through the curtainless window. _I do love you_. And he'd held her, for a long time, his breath warm against her neck.

"Alex."

His voice intruded and she blinked, his face over her, a slight crease between his brows, his expression worried.

_Did you – do you – love me, the way I love you_, she wondered?

"Are you okay?" he asked.

"Yeah," she said, thrusting aside that question and making an effort to focus on him. "I – a lot came back."

She could see the need in his face, to know, what had happened, what she'd remembered, what had changed. She shook her head slightly.

"Not all of it," she told him. "But I remembered you, in Chitaqua, I think, and here."

He tried to smile, a ghost of the cocky, one-sided smile she'd could see now in her memories of him. "Good memories?"

"Not bad ones," she said slowly. "Some of them fit into what I know, some of them don't. They're not … there're emotions, a lot of emotion, when they came back. It's not that clear."

* * *

><p>Dean watched her, his heartbeat uncomfortably loud in his ears, the tightness in his chest still there. Something had changed, again, between them. Memories might've come back, but he thought they'd brought something else with them, some kind of doubt. She lay, not completely relaxed, but not tense either, in his arms, and he could still feel the slowly dissipating twitches and shivers from the last hour and a half, bleeding out of him. He felt heavy and loose, and keyed up and anxious and he didn't know if he could ask her … didn't even know if the question was even the right one now.<p>

"You want some time?" he asked hesitantly, the words forced out unwillingly. This, here, was as close as he'd gotten to her in the last nine months and the last thing he wanted to do was leave. "Want me to go?"

He held his breath, unaware that he was, as she thought about that, and felt his tiny bit of hope disappearing as the silence grew.

"No," Alex said finally, tilting her head back to look at him. "I'd like it if you'd stay."

For now, he wondered, or did she mean something else? "Yeah, of course."

"It was important to you, wasn't it?" she said. "That I knew you, knew all about you?"

He swallowed against the tightness that filled his throat again, his gaze dropping. She'd known it all and she hadn't wanted to change anything about him.

"Yeah, that was important."

"Do you want to stay? Here, I mean, with us?"

For a moment he couldn't take in what she'd said, staring at her disbelievingly.

"Yeah. Yes. I do, if you're sure that's what you want," he blurted out when he realised he'd been silent too long. Something had changed again and he wasn't doing a good job of keeping up. He wasn't keeping up at all, in fact.

"I can't think of any other way to get to know you again," she said simply.

He couldn't disagree with that. "Me either."

Her arms slid around him, and he leaned closer, kissing her tentatively. The anxiety dissolved as she kissed him back, pulling him closer.

_You took the weight away_.

And it had gone.

* * *

><p><em><strong>Lourdes Castle, Lourdes, France<strong>_

The hillside was thickly covered by new growth forest, overlooking the small village that sat on either side of a river. Peter watched the furtive movements in the shadows of the snow-covered standing buildings and ruins through the binoculars.

"What are they doing?" he asked Elena softly.

"Leaving, I think," she replied, her eyes focussed on the valley below as she adjusted the lenses. "All of them."

"Why?"

"I don't know."

There were twenty ghouls, moving around from shadow to shadow in the late afternoon gloom. They moved hurriedly, as if driven by something, and the leaders were already halfway out of the village, shuffling along the white, featureless road that led south, the others dragging heavy bags behind them, following more slowly but no less agitatedly.

Changing his field of view, Peter searched what he could see of the tiny town, in the empty streets and the silent houses, looking for what could've driven out a nest of ghouls from a place that seemed perfect for them. He couldn't see any other movement at all.

"Perhaps another pack is moving in?" Elena suggested diffidently, her glasses swinging to the northern side of the town.

"Even vampires, they would fight, I think," he said, dark brows drawn together. "Or hide and try to pick off, one by one."

The last grey-skinned creature stumbled after its nest, the churned snow showing their direction. South.

"Something else?"

He shook his head. "It must be." He looked around at the fading light. "We should go too, find someplace to bunk down for the night."

They got to their feet, following their back trail out of the woods and back to their four-wheel drive truck, parked under the hollow of the hillside.

"This is the third town we've found that's been abandoned," Elena said as she climbed into the driver's seat and started the engine.

"I know." Peter looked across the frozen fields surrounding them. "All to the north of us."

"Luc said the group of survivors he picked up in Andorra had seen several towns with ghouls inhabiting them."

"Michel told me that the Americans have reported monsters moving out of their territories in the northern states," he said, turning to look at her profile. "They think they're moving because of the cold."

Elena snorted softly. "The cold has never been an issue for ghouls before," she said, glancing at him and back to the featureless road ahead. "I've hunted ghouls in Siberia."

"Yes," Peter said, lifting a shoulder in a shrug. "We should get ahead of that nest, Elena," he added, gesturing to the road. "Take them out in the morning."

She nodded, glancing at the map on the seat between them. "There are two possibilities," she said. "Either will do for us."


	7. Chapter 7 Not Near, Not Far

**Chapter 7 Not Near, Not Far**

* * *

><p><em><strong>December 14, 2013. West Keep, Kansas<strong>_

Sam's eyes narrowed as he watched his brother circling him. Dean moved lightly, on the balls of his feet, his weight balanced and fluid, his face cold and hard and expressionless.

Barefoot and shirtless, the two men were closely matched, Drew thought, despite the younger Winchester's height and weight difference. He glanced at the avid faces of the juniors watching. Dean had more experience, possibly, and was slightly faster. Sam had the greater reach, and he hoped that all the watchers had noted that Dean was careful not to let Sam get in close, where that reach and weight advantage would count.

He'd been a cop for twenty years before the virus had come, shaking down every belief he'd held, exploding every parameter of the world as he'd thought it was. Back then he'd had more than a passing interest in hand-to-hand and the myriad of different styles from raw and dirty street to the highly-stylistic temple martial arts. It'd saved on the paperwork to take down a criminal with a knowledgeable blow to a major nerve centre instead of having to fire his weapon.

There was a flurry of action on the floor and a resounding bang on the hardwood boards as Sam landed on his back, back on his feet with a flickering shoulder spring and rubbing at his shoulder, moving back out of Dean's reach. Drew's attention narrowed on the combatants, analysing and dissecting. He'd fought both, sparring to keep mind and body in high gear, and had a healthy respect for the fact that neither clung to any particular style or pattern and both were very unpredictable.

Ben hand's were clenched into tight fists, his arms crossed over his chest as he watched the bout. Beside him, Krissy was leaning back against the pillar, but he could see the tiny flinches and twitches as she followed every move. He'd faced her a couple of times on the training floor and had been impressed by the way her father had taught her to use the advantages she had, a greater speed and natural dexterity than most of the boys she faced, instead of trying to compete in straight moves and strength with her opponents who were invariably taller, heavier and stronger.

Sam stopped dead, feinted right and left, and slammed a hand out, the heel grazing along Dean's jaw as his brother jerked his head back and let his weight shift back with the blow, taking most of the power out of it. The counter to the solar plexus was faster, Sam's twisting evasion not quite successful and the whoop of his remaining air exiting his lungs loudly echoing around the bare walls and floor. He dropped to one knee under the follow-up jab for his ribs and scythed one leg toward Dean's, over-balancing as his brother jumped it, then rolling backward fast, taking the elbow aimed at the nerve centre in his shoulder on the back of his ribcage instead.

Letting him go, Dean straightened up and turned around, walking lightly back to the centre of the floor and waiting. His brother's skills had improved a lot, he thought, watching Sam get to his feet and walk toward him. Sam'd told him about the fight with Baal, the unbelievable flow and speed he'd had against the archdemon. Some of it, at least, had stuck. Either of the previous two hits would've taken him down before, Dean thought a little wryly, as his brother squared up to him again.

It was their fourth day of joint training in the big building. Drew, Tilly and Seth had been putting in time since Kelly had left. Elias, Rufus and Lee were out, looking for survivors, and since the order had been searching for anything from the church texts or the older mythology on Heaven, angels, prophecies about prophecies and the rest of it, the juniors hadn't been able to get their lessons on lore much in the last few months either.

He'd watched them sparring, shooting, both on the range and against the skeets Seth and Archie had rigged in the empty fields south of the keep, field-stripping their weapons and sitting in the ad-hoc classes that all the hunters gave whenever they had time. There were too many gaps in the training, he'd told his brother.

Sam snaked in and Dean waited until the last second before dropping under his brother's sledgehammer cross, legs scissoring around Sam's and bringing him down, rolling over and trapping his brother's arms against his chest as he shifted his weight to Sam's torso and pinned him there.

He had a big advantage with Sam, he knew. Years of sparring together had sharpened his knowledge of his brother's tells to the point where at least ninety-five percent of the time he knew what he'd do, and how he'd do it.

Sam swung his legs up, their length giving him the momentum to break Dean's grip and reverse the hold. He felt his brother slithering frantically out from under him, one bare foot hammering into Sam's ribs but too late. His brother managed to hook his arm around his neck and with a rolling twist, he was pinned over Sam's raised knee, his back bowed and one arm trapped under him as Sam's forearm cut off his airway.

Then there was the other five percent, Dean considered, slapping his palm against the floor and grinning upside down at his brother. Sam grinned back and let him go and they rolled to their feet, looking at the men, women and kids standing around.

"Even if you know your opponent, don't make the mistake of thinking you know all their moves," Dean said, rubbing the back of his neck. "And with an opponent you don't know, never, ever assume that they won't have something you haven't seen before up their sleeves."

"Weight for weight groups," Sam called out, rotating his shoulder as he felt it stiffening. "We've got an hour before class."

Drew handed Dean a towel, tossing another at Sam as he nodded at the floor. "Rufus told me you two trained since you were younger than these guys?"

Sam glanced at Dean and back to the other man. "Yeah, we started young."

"Impressive."

"Not really," Dean said, dropping the damp towel on the bench and picking up his tee shirt. He could admit that he still wasn't entirely comfortable with the ex-cop, still felt the occasional twinges when his memory threw up an image of Drew solicitously helping Alex. "Elias back from Mississippi yet?"

"Not until the end of the week," Drew said, gesturing vaguely toward the door. "Said that even with the susvee, it'd be a long haul."

Sam wiped the sweat from his face and neck, looking around the room. He saw Adam standing to one side of the closed doors, and nodded to him, rubbing down quickly and grabbing his shirts and jacket.

"Dean, Adam's here, I'll see you at the order tomorrow," he said.

Looking over at the youngest Winchester, Dean nodded. "You know where Liev and Ryan are right now?"

"They've started work on expanding Woodland," Drew said. "Been there all week."

"Right," Dean said, pulling on his shirt and the jacket over it. "Thanks."

"Tilly said you were looking for recommendations, for the trainees?"

Dean sighed softly. "At the end of the week," he said, looking at him. "We're down two experienced hunters, we need more people to make up for them."

"Doing what?" Drew asked curiously.

"Doing what we do," Dean said, a brow lifting humourlessly. "Not finished with this ride yet."

* * *

><p><em><strong>Woodland Keep, Kansas<strong>_

Dean stopped the truck by the gates and got out, hurrying across the packed snow to the gatehouse and yanking his glove off with his teeth as he pulled up his sleeve.

"You here to see Liev?" Scott asked, passing him the flask and spilling salt over his hand.

He nodded, grimacing at the ice-cold water that instantly chilled his stomach and licking off the salt. "Is he in the main keep?"

"Was an hour ago," the young guard confirmed, slipping the knives back into their sheaths. "You know which way to go?"

"Yeah." He turned away, dragging the glove back on. There would be another blizzard tonight, and he didn't think the truck would make it back to West Keep if he didn't get a move on.

The apartment, which had seemed pretty big when it'd been the two of them, was not as comfortable for four, he'd discovered. He needed to find them someplace bigger.

* * *

><p><em><strong>Chukchi Peninsula, Eastern Russia<strong>_

Pulling down the tinted goggles from his eyes, Jack looked at the white-on-white towering cliffs ahead of them. The sea had been frozen all the way across in a single sheet, as far as they'd been able to tell, solid as rock and covered in snow and in the dwindling light, the shadows were the only thing that differentiated the landscape, separating hill from plain and hummock from dip, in blues and purples and fine, pale greys.

There hadn't been any wildlife on the crossing, he thought, the crunch of his boots over the hard-packed snow, the hiss of the sled's runners and a distant rumbling the only noises he could hear. A big, white, empty nothingness and maybe more of the world would look like that, if Kelly's speculations were right. That thought was as cold and as bleak as the landscape.

Like the village on Little Diomede, there were a few buildings left on the rocky shore of the peninsula when they started to climb from the ice level. Doors were mostly gone and the double and triple-glazed windows had vanished, but the shells remained, cutting the freezing wind and a couple still had inner rooms that were far enough from the openings to be considered relatively warm.

"We should be able to get radio once we reach Anadyr," Kelly said as they set up their tents and built a fire on the doorway side of the room. "Airport tower should be intact, enough to help boost a signal."

"How do you know this place, Kelly?" Perry asked curiously, setting a pan of snow over the fire.

The hunter grinned at him. "Ask me no questions, I'll tell you no lies."

Danielle snorted softly and tossed four packs of the dehydrated ration packs to Perry. "Our dear Mr Kowalski was not always a hunter, Perry," she said, lifting a brow at the older man.

"Always a hunter, my dear Miz Wilder," Kelly said, adding a roll to his 'r's'. "But not always a hunter of teeth and claws."

Jack and Perry exchanged a look. "Aren't there monsters here?"

"Plenty," Kelly said, his voice flattening out. "The whole peninsula is full of shallow water, bogs, marshes, soaks, and sinks. Wraiths, whisperers, revenants, rawheads and näkki in abundance. We'll do four two-hour watches tonight, two each," he added, looking at them. "Dan, you and Jack take the first watch."

They nodded readily, turning back to their tasks. Perry threw a handful of coffee beans into a battered pot filled with snow and set it on the edge of the fire as the smell of the re-hydrating and heating food began to fill the room.

* * *

><p>"So what was Kelly doing over here?" Jack asked Danielle quietly when the others had settled into sleep.<p>

She smiled, shaking her head. "He worked for the CIA for awhile."

"What?" Jack turned to look at her in astonishment. "How'd you get him to tell you that?"

"He didn't," she said, shifting her position slightly to see a little more of the hallway outside the open door. "Rufus told me, a few months ago."

"Explains a lot," Jack said, glancing over his shoulder at the tent behind them.

"Doesn't it."

"How come you came with us?"

Danielle turned to look at him. "I wanted to help."

"But you got kids …" he trailed off uncertainly at the look on her face.

"Billy's taking care of them, and when I get back he'll go out on the next job," she said. "Thought you knew that."

Jack shrugged. "Haven't caught up with Billy for a few months."

"What happened?" she asked, keeping her eyes on the door. Billy hadn't said anything about his friends when he'd made his decision to take on the responsibility of being a father. She'd had the impression that he'd had some kind of falling out with the others.

"Nothing, really," he told her. "Billy was pretty adamant about what he wanted, and I didn't really agree."

"You're not staying with Alison?"

"When I'm there, I'm there," he said, discomforted by the turn in the conversation. "That was what we agreed before – when we found out."

"Sounds convenient," she said.

"I didn't plan on having a ready-made family, Dan," he said, hearing the defensiveness creep into his voice and frowning.

"I don't suppose Alison did either."

"She could've given them up," he said shortly. "Chris did."

For a moment, he thought Dan would say something about that. For a long time the two of them had been pretty tight, competing against each other to be the best in their small group. Danielle let out her breath and shrugged.

"Yeah, she did."

"You think that was wrong?" Jack felt the same half-hidden rush of guilt as he did whenever he drove out of the gates of the keep.

"No," Danielle said softly. "It was her decision. I just hope she doesn't regret it later."

She'd hit the problem with that one word, he thought, staring past her at the hall. "If she does, it'll just be another one that make up our lives."

In the tent, Kelly listened to them. Jack was thirty, none of the others had hit that yardstick yet. Rolling over, he thought they had plenty of time to accrue their regrets. He was going to regret not getting enough sleep.

* * *

><p><em><strong>December 16, 2013. Litteris Hominae, Kansas<strong>_

Living here was going to prove too restricting, Sam thought as he looked around the smaller second room they'd claimed from the order's limited amount of accommodation. There was an adjoining door into the larger room, now used as a sitting room and Jean's room, and this room, barely able to fit the double bed and a couple of bureaus, was for them.

"You are a romantic, Sam Winchester," the woman lying beside him said, stretching out, the candle-light gilding her smooth skin.

"Me? Nah," he whispered against her neck, rolling onto his shoulder to look down at her. "I just like the way you look in this light."

Marla laughed, low in her throat, and the sound sent a sharp frisson of memory and emotion along his nerve endings.

It'd taken him several weeks to recognise the changes the relationship had made in him. He was, at one and the same time, more relaxed, with himself, with other people, and yet slightly anxious all the time, keyed up when she wasn't there, more aware of the underlying currents in and between everyone he met, at the order, in the keep.

"Just in this light?" she asked him, shifting up the bed and adopting the provocative pose of a porn starlet, propped on her elbows, head thrown back. Sam's breath whistled out through his teeth involuntarily.

"Not just in this light," he admitted readily, leaning toward her to kiss the long, curving line of her throat.

He was beginning to understand his brother's reactions, he thought as his hands slid over Marla's skin, following waist and hip and long, long thighs. He wanted to be here all the time, with her and her son – their son, he corrected himself absently – and not just for this, this physical closeness that he'd missed so much, but to protect them, to make sure that nothing could happen to them, to keep them safe and be able to feel safe himself, in her arms, in the warmth they made between the three of them. And while he'd been able to see Dean's need for that, he hadn't felt it, hadn't known how it could chew and gnaw inside … until he'd felt it for himself.

He couldn't let go of it. He knew, now, why Dean hadn't been able to either. And why he'd run rather than face the daily reminder of what he'd had and lost.

"That sigh wasn't romantic," Marla said reprovingly, lifting a hand to cup his cheek. He slid down beside her, arm curling automatically around her.

"Let's get married."

She looked at him, eyes wide. "I thought you didn't want to."

The words had come out without conscious thought or intent. He hadn't even realised he'd been thinking of it. And logically, it wouldn't protect her anymore than if they weren't.

He sat up, rubbing his hands over his face and back through his hair as he tried to explain the sudden epiphany.

"What we do here," he started, looking for the right place to start. "What the world is like, it's not going to change now, not going to become safer or better, at least–" he considered, shaking his head. "– not in the very near future." He took her hand between his.

"I'm not going to stop hunting. I love the research and this place," he added, gesturing vaguely around them. "And looking for all the pieces of the puzzles, but I want to _do_ something about them too. And there's still a hell of a lot more we have to do before we can even consider that things have reached a place where a 'normal' life is going to be possible."

"I never thought you'd stop, or want to. The world is what it is, Sam," Marla said softly, a slight crease between her brows as she looked up at him. "I don't know that it was ever any safer."

"No, you're right," he agreed. "So why wait? Why not just fit everything in, as much as we can?"

"You were waiting for things to get better?" she asked him with a slightly wry smile. "That's why you said you didn't want to make a commitment?"

"I didn't want to promise something I couldn't keep," he admitted, his gaze cutting away and back to her. "I know, it was naïve."

"Very romantic," she said, her smile getting wider.

He felt a line of red rising up his neck, the tips of his ears burning and shook his head. "So?"

"So?"

"So … will … you?" he asked as the flush spread up from his neck and over his cheeks. "Marry. Me?"

"Yes, of course," she laughed, touching one cheek. "I don't think I've ever seen you that colour."

* * *

><p><em><strong>December 18, 2013.<strong>_

Dean watched his half-brother walk steadily across the library, one arm filled with a pile of books, the walking stick in his other hand barely supporting him. Adam set the pile on the table and looked around, nodding as he caught sight of him.

"What's that?" Dean asked, walking up to the table and gesturing at the pile.

"Training," Adam told him, hanging the stick on the edge of the table as he sat down. "Jerome's got a list a mile long."

"That what you want to do?"

Adam watched him take a seat on the other side of the table and nodded slowly. "I'm looking at it," he said. "Trying to catch up with the pre-med studies as well. Bob said we could always use more doctors."

"He's right about that," Dean said.

"You don't have to worry about me," his half-brother said, eyes narrowing a little. "I'm good here."

Dean's mouth quirked up to one side. "I'm not worried about you," he said. "You look like you're handling yourself alright."

Adam looked down at the books. "Yeah, I'm getting used to it."

"I, uh, wanted to say, I'm … sorry," Dean said, his gaze cutting away. He'd wanted to have this conversation with Adam for months now, pushing it aside, putting it off as everything else had gotten in the way. Family was more than blood, but Adam had never been given the chance to become family, and that had grated against him.

"For what?"

"That Dad didn't tell us about you," he said, with a small shrug. "It would've made a difference."

"Sam said that too, but I'm not so sure," Adam said slowly. "He told me what happened with you and him, and Dad. It doesn't seem like anything could've changed that."

"Maybe not," Dean admitted, unwillingly seeing that a decision like that by his father could've cut Adam and his mother's lives short much earlier. "I still wish he'd let us know."

"I really hated him for not being there, you know," Adam said quietly. He huffed out a breath. "I couldn't think of a single reason that was so terrible he couldn't be with us."

Dean smiled reluctantly. "Not in the usual list of things, huh?"

"Right." He looked away, his expression tightening slightly.

"My mom, she missed him," he said, looking back at his brother. "She loved him. She'd just light up when he did come, and fall flat for a week after he left. I was more angry at him for that than anything else."

Thinking back through his memories of the falls of those years, Dean realised that his father had disappeared regularly around that time, returning quickly. He'd been tense and angry, time after time when he did. They'd all been seriously fucked up by the decisions that had been forced on John Winchester.

"If it makes any difference, I think he loved her too," he said to Adam. "And you. He never would've kept you so far away if he hadn't wanted to protect you."

Adam nodded. "Yeah, I – when I saw – I figured that out eventually. I'm sorry for freezing up on you, back in Texas."

Dean pushed aside the memories that rose suddenly, shrugging them off with well-practised control. "Everyone freezes at first, Adam. No harm, no foul."

"Adam?"

They turned to see Frances standing at the end of the table. Dean glanced at Adam, hiding his surprise when he saw the younger man's face soften as he looked at her. He'd thought there'd been something between Adam and Christine, at one time. That seemed to have changed.

"Uh, Dean, you know Frances?"

Dean nodded to the order's initiate. "We've met."

"Sorry to interrupt," she said, with a small nod to him. "I could use a hand if you have some time."

"Sure," Adam told her, getting up and looking back at his half-brother with a shy smile. "Six month old twins."

Dean ducked his head. "Know about that."

Adam started away from the table, then stopped, half-turning. "Dean?"

"Yeah?"

"Uh …" he faltered, looking down at the floor.

The corner of Dean's mouth lifted a little. The kid was a Winchester. "It's all good, Adam. I'll see you around."

"Right."

He watched his brother walk down the length of the library aisle, head bent close to Frances'. There was a wealth of intimacy in the unconscious gesture, her hand curled lightly around his arm. Turning away and walking down the steps to the situation room, Dean thought that at twenty-three, settling down had been the last thing on his mind. He stopped mid-step and realised that at twenty-three, he'd told Cassie the secret, hoping they'd be able to make it work out. The realisation made him grimace inwardly.

"Dean," Jerome said, dragging his thoughts back to the present. "Elena just sent a message from Lourdes."

"About?"

"Ghouls." Hitting the print button, the scholar gestured to the now-chattering printer.

He picked up the sheet of paper, gaze skimming down it. "Just the one nest or did they see more?"

"Four in total," Jerome read from the screen. "They hit the ones they saw, but Luc and Renaud saw movement as well, through the mountains, every group was heading south."

Like the wendigo and the others, he thought, eyes half-closed as he let the disparate pieces float in his mind, looking for the connections. As hard as it was to believe, given the normal territories of those creatures, there was only one consistent explanation for the movement.

"What'd they say about the weather?"

"Bad, early storms, same as here," Jerome said, turning the chair around to face him. "Think that's it?"

"Yeah," Dean muttered, folding up the paper and tucking it into his pocket. "Too cold in the north now." He looked at Jerome. "Alex said you had some stuff you wanted her to look over?"

"That pile," Jerome said, gesturing to two archive boxes sitting on the desk near the bottom of the stairs. "The angel hierarchies, the known bloodlines of the hunters, copies of the fragments we have on the prophecies."

"What do you expect her to find?"

"I'm not _expecting_ anything," Jerome said dryly, lifting a shoulder in a half-shrug. "Just hoping that a fresh pair of eyes might see something we missed."

* * *

><p><em><strong>Heaven<strong>_

Gabriel walked down the long marble corridor toward the proclamation hall, head bowed as he thought about what the Power had told him. If Metatron had changed the prophecies, to misdirect those reading about them, he must have known the truth about them, who the Sentinel was, or how they were chosen. Only the scribe had the real information. Once he'd handed over the tablets to the Qaddiysh, their locations had been hidden from him.

He stopped mid-stride, rethinking that. Castiel had said that the scholars had found the areas where the tablets were hidden, using the scribe's sigil as a key to a divination spell. What was there to stop Metatron from commanding those locations from his own sigil? Calling out and seeking the frequency of his name with all the power of the souls of Heaven?

Why wouldn't the scribe tell Camael those locations, he wondered? Why force the archangel into killing and hunting down the Qaddiysh keepers for them?

Unless Metatron was not working with Camael at all.

He looked down at the smooth marble floor and scowled. Was he seriously considering that more than one mind was behind this? That it was coincidence or happy chance that the bloodlines had been manipulated and Lucifer released as a separate gambit to the finding of the Word and the Grigori's desire to return here?

Look to motive, he told himself firmly, walking slowly along the corridor. The Grigori's desperation is well-known. And Camael was Metatron's student. The scribe had vanished three thousand years ago. The orders for the bloodlines had come from Raphael. The battle for Gem Shel Yed'e, Uriel's battalion against the nephilim had also come from Raphael and that had been just after the scribe had fallen. Who had directed the Lord of the Air in his endeavours to retrieve the angel tablet? Had that been a first ploy, the bloodlines a fall-back plan to release Lucifer and give the fallen a clear chance at finding the Word?

He thought the vast hall was empty when he entered. A soft rustle of feathers, echoing in whispers along the hard surfaces drew his gaze to the pillar to the left of the low dais.

"Michael."

The commander of the heavenly Host looked up. "More good news?"

"Hard to say," Gabriel answered, slowing as he took in the dullness in his brother's eyes. "The manuscripts in the library were tampered with."

"Of course they were," Michael said, his voice filled with resignation. "What did you find?"

"Zephon stated that the alterations didn't make sense, there were no further writings when he'd taken them from our Father, whatever Metatron deleted, he must have added himself first," Gabriel told him, sitting on the steps beside his brother and stretching out his legs. "How long was the Power scribe before Metatron?"

Michael shook his head. "Lucifer did his initial training with him; I think most of the younger ones did. He was the first. Metatron took over just before Lucifer and the others rebelled." The archangel turned his head to look at him. "Why?"

Gabriel shook his head, unsure of what he was thinking. "Has Castiel returned?"

"No." Michael looked down at the marble floor, his wings rustling softly. "We cannot see the Grigori, not even a broad location. I've sent two of the Authorities to look for them, but …"

"They will have shielded themselves tightly, if Camael revealed to them the fate of their brothers," Gabriel said, nodding. "Without him, they cannot move far or fast."

"Without His Presence, I am lost, Gabriel."

The Angel of Death drew in a long breath. "He has never abandoned us completely before, Michael. You must keep your Faith, in all things. What we were created for, what they were created for. He will not let evil overcome."

As if the words had lent a brief and temporary strength, Michael straightened up against the pillar, his expression smoothing out.

"Did you learn anything of this Sentinel prophecy?"

"No. In all truth, Michael, I'm not sure that it even exists, as a true Word from our Father," Gabriel said, turning to him, his voice and eyes full of doubt. "I know that Lucifer claimed that we would dispensable once mankind came to its maturity, and he hinted at a guardian that would take over the responsibilities with which we had been charged, but there is nothing in the library – or Zephon's memories – that support that."

"Was that what Metatron erased?"

"Surely it would have been spoken to the Scribe long before he took the role?" Gabriel frowned. "Lucifer –"

"What?"

"I don't know," the archangel said uncertainly. "There was something in the promises the Morning Star was making but it is not coming clear to me now."

"You were tempted by those promises, Gabriel," Michael reminded him softly. "I remember your anger with humanity."

"I was busy down there," Gabriel acknowledged dryly. "It seemed that they would never learn. And even now, their behaviour is frequently questionable."

Michael snorted. "As is ours," he said, the deep warm tones of his voice flattening out. "It would not surprise me to learn that our Father left in disgust with us all."

"He created us. As we are, without free will or the ability to make our own choices."

"And yet…" Michael said, turning slowly to look at his brother. "We have made our own choices. Lucifer chose to rebel. Someone here chose to act against the Word, against the Will and has plotted to bring us to the Second War and bring down the pillars…"

"Michael, we have no souls –"

"No, we do not. No guiding light of love and conscience," Michael muttered, staring at the floor. "Just the same as they were imbued with – the ability to choose and the understanding between good and evil and the consequences of both. How could we guide them if we had not those things, Gabriel? How could we protect them? No soul, no everlasting life, but …"

He swung away, alabaster and pearl wings shimmering in the light. "We have all of their sins, my brother, and once, we had their virtues. What have we now?"

Gabriel looked at him, brows drawing together as he tried to follow his brother's argument. "Still choice."

"Yes," Michael said decisively. "Still choice. All of us. Free to choose. And all of us, desperate for a Father's love that has been gone for too long."

"You think He will return if Heaven falls?" Gabriel asked.

"I don't know if He will or will not," Michael snapped, walking toward the doors at the end of the chamber. "I do think that is why this has been planned."

* * *

><p><em><strong>Crows Nest Keep, Kansas<strong>_

Echoing from the concrete walls, the black car's engine rumbled to silence and Dean opened the door, looking around the narrow court. Liev gestured to the iron doors to one side.

"This is the only place I've got without throwing people out," he said, walking to the doors and opening them.

Dean walked through the short tunnel between the keep's inner walls and blinked in surprise. There were four houses, in a space of nearly ten acres, walled around by the outer curtain walls, the inner court grassed over and the houses separated by small, wild fields and thick copses of trees.

"What the hell is this?" Dean asked, pivoting on his heel as he stared.

Liev gave a short laugh. "These were here and marked when we looked at the way to set up the keep," he explained, walking down the narrow road toward the furthest house. "I ended up walling it in as it was because of the accommodation shortage, but most folks are still a bit uncomfortable with wood construction, so there wasn't a big demand for them." He gestured at the houses that were closer to the keep walls, on either side of the road. "Ryan took that one, told me he'd never get a chance to work on an older house again; Billy and Chris took the other side."

"What about the other two?"

"The one past the barn is still a bit questionable," Liev said. "I think it was probably abandoned before the virus. That one," he added, looking at the two story frame house they were approaching. "It's fine, just needs some TLC and it's good for another hundred years."

They stepped off the road onto a grassy verge, and walked up between the bare, leafless trees that partially screened the place. To one side, a slightly sagging timber shed stood, big barn doors hanging askew on rotted hinges. The front had a three-quarter porch, deep and sheltered, and a bay window on both first and second floors, jutting out past the porch. He could just make out the sigil of Gabriel, faint against the peeling strips of weathered paint.

Climbing the porch steps, none of them creaking or sagging, he acknowledged Liev's cocked brow with a nod. It all seemed to be pretty sound. The front door opened into a wide hallway, with a steep staircase running up one side. Beyond the stairs, double doors stood ajar, showing large, square rooms, still papered in some blousy, floral design from the fifties, the carpet over the hardwood boards thin and dusty and unravelling at the edges.

"This'd fit a family," Dean remarked, walking through the dining room, gloomy with the dirt covering the windows, into a big kitchen. Beyond the kitchen a laundry and downstairs bath and a backdoor. In the kitchen another door with a rusted lock was near the big stove – basement, he thought.

"Yeah, it's roomy," Liev agreed readily. "I guess folks want the reassurance of stone and concrete after what they've been through."

He wouldn't've minded stone, but with standard protection, and the keep walls around it, Dean thought this would work fine. They crossed the hall, seeing a double living room on the other side of the house, then turned and walked up the stairs.

Upstairs, four bedrooms and a bathroom took up the same space as the rooms below, and an short narrow flight of stairs led up to the attic space at the end of the hallway.

"Only thing, Dean," Liev said, his tone becoming apologetic as they stood together in the front bedroom. "You're on your own with whatever you want done to this place. I've got keep work backed up till spring, and I can't spare anyone –"

Dean shook his head. "No, that's alright. I can do this."

Liev gave him a doubtful look. "Well, if you still want it, you got it."

* * *

><p><em><strong>December 19, 2013. Camp Tawas, Lake Tawas, Michigan<strong>_

He had to keep mostly hidden, through the days, at least. At night it was easier to move around, get information he needed. One of those he'd thought an easy mark had shaken her head and told him it was too late. He'd been tempted at the time to crush her as he had the first, but had decided against it. Too many missing and they would look for him. It didn't matter now anyway. The slender blonde was here, and in the big office on the first floor he'd seen the photographs, in them all her expression had been the same.

* * *

><p>"We found her body two days ago, neck broken, nothing else," Boze said, his face drawn and worried in the greyish light that filled the office. "Wasn't like she was well-liked around here or anything, but no one disliked her enough for this."<p>

"Neck broken?" Jo looked at him, a small crease appearing between her brows. "An accident, maybe?"

Renee shook her head. "No accident," she said, her voice clipped. "Meredyth said the cartilage and bone had been crushed."

Jo's expression smoothed out as she took that in. "Crushed."

"There was a lot of trauma to the neck," Boze explained tiredly. "It looks like she didn't die immediately and her whole neck was swollen, we couldn't get much more information from it. Meredyth did the autopsy, and she said that the larynx and spine had been crushed to powder, inside the neck."

"Like a – vice?"

"Yeah."

"That seems pretty personal," Jo said, turning to Renee. "How would someone've gotten her to put her neck into a vice?"

The tall blonde snorted. "Got me. Drugs or drunk, maybe. Meredyth's got her blood samples, but it'll be a couple more days."

"I can't believe we've got monsters and angel worries and still have to deal with murder."

"No, seems damned redundant, but there it is," Boze agreed bitterly. "If someone had a grudge, they might've headed for Lake West, lay low until things get quieter again."

"I'll keep an eye out for anyone new over there," Jo said, a thin shiver rippling through her. Since the devil's attack on the camps, they'd felt safe, even when the werewolves had been stalking them, she'd never had a moment's doubt about the people inside the walls.

"Did you hear anything further from Kansas or France?" she asked Boze, getting to her feet and hearing the faint pops in her back as she straightened up.

"Not since Elena's message about the ghouls," the leader of Tawas told her. "Wouldn't be surprised if that was happening here too, further east, we never had much of a problem with them here, but we could send a couple out to watch Chicago."

She nodded. "That was infested with them. It would give us an idea of the consistency of what might be happening."

"Jo, Bobby said they might need some help if they do figure out this prophecy business," Boze said to her as she started for the door. "You got any trainees you think would suit?"

"Two," she said over her shoulder, her hand resting on the door handle. "Marcus and Trip. They're itching to do something other than patrol the woods; it'd be good for them."

* * *

><p>Walking down the hall, head bowed in thought, she wondered again at the short-term memories of people. It was only December and they'd had two severe storms so far, not to mention four different sightings of wraiths around the lakes. Surely those were more significant in terms of survival than a damned grudge against someone.<p>

She'd wanted to kill the girl herself, just on principle, when she'd heard some of things she'd been saying about Dean, but both Boze and Rufus had drawn her aside and told her to let Renee handle it. If she hadn't succumbed to the desire to stop her mouth for good, she couldn't think that anyone in the camps could've had a good reason for it. Of course, since moving up here, Zoe had made a few enemies for other reasons. But one didn't usually let in one's enemies, and Renee had been pretty certain that whoever had done it had been close to the girl.

More guards and a triple entry series of tests, she thought, her feet following the hall automatically as she headed for the front doors. An emphasis on really looking at the people who came in and out of the fortified compounds, getting to know them, talking to them, maybe. Both Boze and Bobby had thought that would be a way to filter any croats, although they really were just whistling in the wind on that issue. They didn't know if the virus had damaged the brains of its victims, in some way that would show up in normal interactions, or if it had hit the limbic system and played on the emotions only.

"Hey, Jo."

She looked up in surprise. "Dean, what are you doing here?"

"Had some time, thought I'd touch base with you and Boze, get an update," he said, straightening up from the wall he'd been leaning against and walking to her.

"Weren't we clear enough in the report?" she asked, frowning slightly as he stepped in close to her.

"Crystal," he agreed. "You know me, just like to get hands-on with this stuff."

"Boze and Renee are in the office," she told him, taking a step further toward the main hall. "I –"

"Not running off so quick, are you?" he asked her, lifting a hand and pushing back a loose strand of hair from her temple.

_Been here before._

The thought flashed into her mind as she stared up at him. Not _here_ here, but close to here.

"What's going on?"

"Just been awhile since we caught up, Jo," he said, stepping closer. She could feel his exhale against her cheek as he ducked his head a little. "I thought we could, you know, find somewhere nice and relaxing and talk."

For a long moment as her nerves fizzed and crackled with the feel of his fingers light against the side of her neck, she considered it. Whether it was a physical reaction or an emotional one, it hadn't really died for her, just been sublimated in a new life, a life of responsibility and someone else.

_Someone else._

She felt it, the second the old reactions died. Just vanished, his touch just a touch, no longer sending a low-voltage charge through her. She ducked her head, pulling in a deep breath that was part relief and part satisfaction. _Look, ma, I'm all grown up_.

"You can talk to Boze about whatever you need to," she said, taking a half-step back from him. "I've got a family to get home to."

"Ah, Jo, c'mon," he said, smiling at her. "Not gonna pretend that there's nothing there now, are you?"

_Here before_. The thought returned much more strongly. Not with _Dean_. With _Sam_.

"You're not Dean."

He looked at her and she saw the sardonic humour in his eyes disappear, his expression flattening out to a stony stare.

"Who else would I be?"

"Not Dean," she said. Her hand slapped against the butt of the gun in the pancake holster under the hem of her jacket at the small of her back. "Silver rounds."

He hesitated a second and she drew the gun, cocking and firing in a smooth fluid action, seeing the .44 calibre round punch into the man's shoulder from the back as he spun around and sprinted up the corridor she'd just come down.

"Boze! Sean!" she screamed at the top of her lungs, accelerating up the corridor behind him.

She came around the corner to see Renee and Boze standing in front of the office, staring as she pelted up to them.

"Did you see him?"

"Who?" Renee asked, holding a steadying hand against Jo's shoulder as she skidded to a stop beside them.

"Shifter, I think," she gasped, shaking her head. "Maybe the alpha shifter, he looked like Dean."

The same thought exploded in their minds at the same time. Zoe would've let in Dean, no question.

"Double-check," Boze said, his face thunderous. "Renee, get Bobby on the radio, check if Dean's in Kansas."

He looked at Jo and at the gun in her hand. "You get him?"

"Winged him," she confirmed, looking down the hall. "He came this way."

"Must've been white lightning, we came out just before you came around the corner," he told her shortly. "What did he want with you?"

"I don't know," she said. "He said he wanted to talk."

"Talk about what?"

"He didn't say." She shook her head, pushing aside the memory of his fingers against her skin. "You think he killed Zoe?"

Renee called out from the inside of the office, "Bobby says Dean's there."

"Why change to look like Dean? Everyone knows him. He must've had to hide for days since Dean was here."

Boze shrugged, turning back to go into the office. "Renee, get on the horn to the gates, to the guards on the palisades and to Sean, Tag, Rona and Marsh. They see Dean; they put him down, silver rounds, biggest they're carrying, heart and head shots only."

She nodded and picked up the phone, dialling the numbers fast. "Bobby wanted to know what the hell we were talking about."

"Soon as we've got the compound locked down, I'll talk to him."

He turned back to Jo. "Zoe had a crush," he said, looking levelly at her. "You did too, one time."

She nodded unwillingly. "And shifters are genetic anomalies."

"Able to pass on those anomalies. And more so the alpha, I think," he agreed.

* * *

><p><em><strong>December 21, 2013. West Keep, Kansas<strong>_

Rufus watched Dean sidle into the big office, hands in his pockets.

"Where the hell have you been?" he growled at the younger man.

"Working on the car," Dean said repressively, looking at Bobby. "What'd Renee say?"

"Said that someone was there who looked like you." Bobby leaned back against the desk. "Said that someone killed Zoe and tried to hit on Jo."

"What!?"

"Boze thinks the shifter went after them because it got some knowledge from you about them." Rufus looked at him dryly.

"Why the hell would it look like me?" Dean demanded, a flickering memory shooting in his mind as the words came out. "Some dude ran into me, last time we were there –"

Bobby nodded. "Jo thinks the shifter has been hiding there for a while."

"Shifters don't turn," Rufus said, looking down at the floor. "They just copy, but they have to come from somewhere."

Another memory, much older returned to him. "We ran into a shifter in St Louis in '05," he said slowly, digging for what Rebecca had told them – told him – before they'd left. "Rebecca said it was talking about evolution and mutations."

"They're anomalies," Bobby agreed. "Born different, like rugaru."

"So it's trying to make itself some kids?" Dean looked from Bobby to Rufus disbelievingly.

"Maybe," Rufus said. "Boze thinks it's the alpha."

"Did Sam find any lore on the shifters at the order?" Dean moved to the back of the sofa, leaning against it.

"Found a whole lotta stuff," Bobby said. "Shifters, the ordinary ones, can't do it. They're born, they live for an unknown length of time and they only die if someone sticks a silver blade or bullet into them."

"Immortal?"

"Looks like," Bobby said. "But they can't make more. Only the first-born shifter can increase the population and that's through the regular way that all humans make more."

"Why kill Zoe if it wanted a family?" he added, looking from Dean to Rufus. "Kind of defeats the purpose, don't it?"

"She couldn't have kids," Dean said shortly.

"That's why she ended up on the skinwalker hunt," Rufus added.

Bobby rubbed a hand along his jaw. "Well, that might explain why it killed her then."

"Is Jo alright?" Dean asked him.

"Yeah, she figured it wasn't you and shot it as it was getting away," Bobby said. "They haven't found it yet, but they've got the camps buttoned down."

"Everyone being tested?"

"And then some."

"Good."

"Don't know how long it's been there," Rufus pointed out sourly. "Might be a few kids with some special abilities in nine months time."

Dean looked away. "Meredyth and Ray looking into that?"

"Yeah," Bobby said. "As much as they can."

"When do you want to go?" Rufus looked at the hunter, one brow raised. "I mean, we can use the susvees pretty much anytime, if you want to wait until you've finished fixing up the house."

Dean's brows drew together suspiciously as he looked at him. "What're you talking about?"

"Less you're painting the Impala with white house-paint, you weren't working on the car, kid." He grinned and gestured at the white paint speckles that flecked the younger man's face. "Rollers, I remember them."

Bobby's face creased into a one-sided smile. "Was all wall-papering back in my day."

Rufus nodded. "Yeah, I had a fair amount of that stiff sonofabitch paper to hang too. 'Course, it was a labour of love."

"Shut it," Dean said, scowling as he straightened up. The last thing he needed was these two, reminiscing about the old days and making pointed comments about nesting. "Jerome said there's a helluva front heading our way. We're not making it to Michigan before Christmas."

Rufus snorted, grinning at Bobby. "Ah, you remember that first Christmas at home, Bob?"

"Yeah, our first snowed like crazy –"

Dean sighed and left the room, letting the door bang shut behind him. The house was nearly done. And he wasn't going to be admitting to anyone how much he was looking forward to a real Christmas, in his own home, with his own family.

* * *

><p><em><strong>December 23, 2013. Crows Nest Keep, Kansas.<strong>_

Alex looked around the big room slowly.

"You like it?" Dean asked, shifting from foot to foot unconsciously. He was acutely aware that every choice he'd made, everything he'd done here was showing more of himself than he normally allowed anyone to see. Anyone but her, he amended silently.

"It's incredible," she said, turning to look at him finally. She seemed about to say something else, but her gaze dropped and she turned away. He saw the movement in her throat and walked over to her.

The fireplaces were cheery with fires he'd lit early, before he'd brought her over. The furniture he'd bargained for with Jackson and Riley, Ted and Sophia and Lawrence, from the big farmhouses in Ghost Valley and Woodland, an eclectic mix of old-fashioned timber desks and shelving and tables and chairs, big, overstuffed sofas and chairs in faded solid and floral materials, nothing really matching anything else, but surprisingly, when he'd moved everything in, he'd thought it went pretty well together. It looked like a home, looking around over Alex's head. Not a flash or a modern one, a home like he'd spent his first four years in. The sort of home he knew Alex had grown up in. Just comfortable and … safe.

The walls were filled with hex bags, the order's extra-powerful ones, stuffed into the cavities and sealed over again. Iron bar ran along the outside of the low boundary fence, and buried tiles and shards of mirror made another zone of protection closer to the buildings. Wards and guards, sigils, icons and seals were painted and carved into the beams and rafters and joists, over every entrance and opening, webbing the house in an invisible net of traps. It was as safe as he could make it.

Following her through the rooms, he remembered doing the same thing at Chitaqua. Then his attention had been focussed on the house, on all that it'd held and all its possibilities for his small group of survivors. He'd been watching her, even then, but it'd been a subconscious thing, assessing, evaluating, observing, too distracted by the responsibilities that weighted his every decision. He remembered she hadn't spoken much, telling him about the supplies that were there, but no questions and no nervous chatter.

She didn't say anything now, either, just walked through the place, looking at everything, opening the cupboards and the doors, the drawers in the cabinets. She'd done exactly the same thing when they'd gone to look at the apartment in West Keep. He'd had to wait until the end of the inspection to see her reactions.

Upstairs, she stopped in the bedroom next to the one he'd decided could be theirs, looking at the two cots that he'd placed to either side of the big sash window in the south wall. He couldn't work out what she was thinking, her face almost expressionless in the cool, grey light.

"I remembered not knowing how to tell you," she said, so softly that he took a couple of steps closer, head bent to catch the words. "I remembered being afraid that you didn't want this burden, when you had so much else to do, so much responsibility resting on you."

"It wasn't a burden, and it wasn't this, us, that I was afraid of," he said, standing as close to her as he could, not quite ready to risk a touch. He couldn't judge her mood, couldn't tell where she was, in the memories, in the past or present.

She looked up at him, her mouth twisting down a little. Again, he had the strong sense she was about to say something, and his stomach tightened, then she closed her eyes and slipped her arms around him, tucking her cheek against his chest.

_What_, he wanted to ask, to know? What was it that she kept holding back?

* * *

><p><em><strong>December 25, 2013.<strong>_

Looking at the tree that filled the corner of the room, a home-made foil and glitter-paste star brushing the ceiling, Dean swallowed against the memory, smiling through it.

"I still don't know what made him change his mind," he said, one shoulder lifting slightly.

He looked at Alex when he heard her soft exhale.

"He figured that what you wanted was more important than what he wanted," she said gently, shifting to lean against him. He lifted his arm, drawing her closer.

Sam had been angry. Angry at the deal that'd saved his life but was going to take the last of his family. Angry that he couldn't find a way out of it. Angry with his brother for making it. Angry at himself. Angry at the world.

"Our Christmases were kind of sucky," Dean admitted, a half-smile at the memories of the needle-less trees and stolen gifts or no gifts at all creeping back. "I was okay, if they were both there, that's all I needed," he added, breathing in deeply, his chest loosening a little with her scent all around. "But there's no getting around it, they were mostly pretty lame."

She didn't say anything and he knew she was waiting, knowing somehow that he would take a long time to think through and figure out what he wanted to say. That knowledge, like her scent, was reassuringly familiar. It was what he knew about her. It hadn't changed.

"When Dad made the deal …" he hesitated, pushing and pulling at the memories that crowded close with the words. "I didn't know how to accept it, you know? It felt wrong. Really wrong."

_You know, I put – I put too much on your shoulders, I made you grow up too fast. You took care of Sammy, you took care of me. You did that, and you didn't complain, not once. I just want you to know that I am so proud of you._

That'd made the pit he could feel bigger … wider … deeper. His father, saying that to him with tears filling his eyes. He remembered shaking with the fear that had begun to curl and twist inside of him.

"We knew, me and Sam, we both knew there was no such as coincidence, but neither of us said anything, not one fucking word about me coming back and him dying."

He'd lied to Sammy then, standing next to his father's pyre. And he'd lied until he couldn't stand the deceit and the words and the pain a second longer. He hadn't expected the backlash, the accusations and the plain loss of trust he'd seen in Sam's eyes. Caught between them, one last time, his loyalty torn and shredded.

"I didn't grieve for him, not really," he said, feeling her arm tighten around his ribs. "I blamed him for the way things got worse, for the way I felt like every day I was making the wrong decisions, fucking up our lives, fucking up Sammy's chances." He closed his eyes.

The visions. The other demon-infected children. That iron bar that had taken out the rapist in an act he still couldn't fathom. Meg. And the djinn.

"I felt his last breath, against the side of my neck, felt it and knew it was the last one, even when I was waiting for his chest to move again, waiting and waiting for it," he told her, told himself, no longer sure who he was re-opening those old scars for. "I tried to accept it." He shook his head. "I really tried, but I couldn't. When I looked ahead, even just a little way ahead, there was nothing but black. I couldn't see life. At all."

_I just wanted you to be a kid ... just for a little while longer. I always tried to protect you ... keep you safe ... Dad didn't even have to tell me. It was just always my responsibility, you know? It's like I had one job ... I had one job ... and I screwed it up. I blew it. _

How long had he felt that? His whole life. From the moment his father had put his brother into his arms and he'd gone down the stairs, his heart in his mouth, so goddamned mindful of the fact that he had to hurry but he couldn't because he couldn't risk dropping Sammy …

"I didn't want to die," he said to Alex, the words gusting out on a long breath. "And I didn't think, really, of what a deal would mean, not then. I just couldn't fail at the only purpose I'd ever had in my life. Not on top of losing Dad, of the sacrifice he'd made. I didn't think of how it would feel to Sam, only of how I couldn't live with myself if I didn't do whatever I could do."

_I guess that's what I do. I let down the people I love. I let Dad down. And now I guess I'm just supposed to let you down, too. How can I? How am I supposed to live with that? What am I supposed to do?_

In that moment, before he'd remembered, realised, recognised the way out, he'd been flying apart. Nothing, he rationalised much later, would ever hurt the way that had, that instant of knowing that his father had made his sacrifice for nothing, knowing that he wasn't going to be the man his father was, the man he'd wanted to be, knowing that he would let everyone down, sooner or later, even if he could find a way forward, there would never be a moment's peace for him, never be a calm port in the storm, never be any kind of happiness.

"Man, he was pissed, when he found out," he said, shaking his head slightly, trying to dispel the memories of his choice, the gradual recognition of what he'd done, what the cost was going to be. "He saw, straight away, what it was. I didn't – fuck, I was high for weeks just on the fact that he was still alive."

Bobby had seen as well. The old man's anger had been driven by pain, but it had still shaken him, seeing all that emotion in his face, all that feeling that had been directed at him. That had been _because_ of him.

"I couldn't let him die," he said, barely breathing the words out. They were the echo of what he'd said to Bobby, in the heatless sunshine of the salvage yard, seeing the brightness in Bobby's eyes, unable to believe then that it was for him.

He heard the deep sigh beside him, and blinked away the past, looking down at the tousled dark gold curls against his shoulder.

"Pretty fucking hopeless all the way round, huh?" he said, wishing suddenly for a fraction of a psychic power that would let him know what she was thinking. "It was what Heaven planned, because my Dad didn't break down there."

Alex lifted her head, looking into his eyes. "You'd do it the same way again."

Her certainty shook him. He would, he knew. There was only one thing he'd change if he had a chance to go back and do it again.

"Yeah."

"Do you still think you don't deserve anything, Dean?"

He looked back at the tree, lips dry and his tongue licking over them nervously.

_I've made some mistakes. But I've always done the best I could._

Saying it out loud, saying it in words, was like inviting bad luck, he thought. John Winchester had done the best he could. He'd done the best he could. Neither of their best had been good enough to stop the plans of the angels of Heaven or the demons of Hell.

"I lost my family," he said, the words coming out like fragments of glass through a throat that was too full of memory and pain. "I couldn't protect them, couldn't save them. I lost friends, dragged them into the firing line and they paid for it."

"But you had them," she said softly. "No one would have followed you, or loved you, if you hadn't given them something too."

He frowned, mouth twisting down slightly. "I didn't let anyone in, not even Sam, most of the time."

_No one but you_, he thought, turning to look at her. _And I paid for that_.

"You let me in," she countered. "You said I knew you."

He drew in a deep breath, feeling the nervousness drop away abruptly, a measure of peace and either acceptance or resignation fill him. He hadn't looked at it, hadn't admitted … then. He wanted to now. "And if it hadn't been for the people depending on me, I'd've welcomed a bullet when you died."

He felt her ribs rise sharply; her arms around him tighten hard. "That would've been a mistake."

"Yeah," he agreed sardonically. "It would've been."

Maybe that was why he'd never let go, had told himself savagely that she was dead in his head, but had never believed it in his heart. He didn't know. He'd tried. As he'd tried to accept it with Sam. He'd known better than to make a deal to bring her back, and now he understood what Death had meant when he'd said he couldn't help him, but he hadn't let go.

"If I don't … remember … don't get all those memories back … if they never come back …" she said, drawing away from him slightly, looking down so that he could only see the top of her head, not her expression.

"It doesn't matter," he said, his arm closing around her, hand dropping to catch her chin and lift her face, so he could see her eyes. "Do you want to be here?"

His heart slowed as she hesitated, her lashes casting shadows over her cheeks as they lowered.

"Is it enough?" she asked after a minute's silence.

"Yeah, it's enough."

His pulse accelerated, he could feel the beat in his ears, in his throat, in the blood that rushed along vein and capillary and artery. _You make the weight disappear_, he said to her in his mind, tasting her lips, feeling her arms curl around his neck. It was more than enough to keep him going, keep him fighting.

* * *

><p><em><strong>December 27, 2013. Litteris Hominae, Kansas<strong>_

Jerome wheeled his chair down the ramp and along the curving counter as the insistent beeps from the computer continued.

"Alright, alright, I'm coming!" he muttered to it, hitting the Break key and reading the message from Lourdes. His face whitened and his hand snatched at the phone on the desk beside him.

"Bobby, need you and Rufus and Dean over here as soon as possible," he barked into the handset as soon as he heard Singer's voice on the other end. "Just come!"

He set the phone down, staring at the message unhappily. _Why_, he wondered? _What possible reason could they have?_

* * *

><p>Dean finished reading the message and turned to look at Jerome, his face hard. "Why?"<p>

"An excellent question I've been asking myself non-stop," Jerome said tersely.

"Why what?" Sam came down the stairs and looked at the group standing by the screens.

Dean looked over Jerome's head at his brother, and Sam saw the bleakness in his expression before he turned away, his face closed and shuttered again.

"Michel got a message from Marc this morning. They're in Russia," Jerome told Sam, gesturing at the screen. "The alpha vampire attacked them in Slovakia, a couple of weeks ago, killed Adrian but left Marc and Christophe alive, apparently to deliver a message to Dean."

"The message?" Sam asked, watching Dean walk away, shoulders hunched and rigid.

"That the Grigori are still looking for Alex, they haven't finished with her yet," Jerome said softly.

"What?"

"Why would that vamp tell Marc about this?" Bobby demanded, brows drawn together. "Where's the advantage to it?"

"An' why would they want her? They made two copies, and they killed them both," Rufus added, his eyes following Dean worriedly as he paced around the room and stopped abruptly beside the situation table.

Felix cleared his throat quietly. "Perhaps they have been fed the same information as Raphael had?"

Jerome turned to look at him. "That the last scion can control the tablets? Those bloodlines have vanished! How would they know if she was the one? We can't verify it."

"I don't know, Jerome, only it would explain why of the three hostages they took, they only copied her."

"But why destroy the copies?" Rufus asked, looking from Felix to the legacy. "If they were trying to create a key to finding the angel tablet, why use that effort as decoys?"

"If that rogue arc gave them that information, he was acting on what was written in the library in Heaven, wasn't he?" Ellen asked shortly. "The texts that Cas said had been tampered with?"

"Yes." Jerome looked at her, his eyes narrowed. "You think he tampered with them, getting the information and erasing it?"

She shrugged. "Metatron said that the lines were lost, but he fell before they died out, or got lost or whatever really happened."

Staring down at the situation table, Dean drew in a deep breath. "It doesn't matter," he said coldly.

"What do you mean?" Sam asked, looking over at him. "We need to know what they –"

"No. What we need to do is find that tablet and get the heat off – off here," Dean cut him off sharply.

"How?" Bobby's voice cut through the silence.

"I don't know!" Dean snapped, turning back to the table. "But we have to find a way, talk to Cas, get him to take us over there."

Sam exchanged a look with Bobby. They could get over there, but without the knowledge of the location, without knowing who it was the prophecy mentioned to draw the sands aside, they would be wandering in the desert for years without achieving anything.

"What about the shapeshifter?" Sam asked reluctantly. "That was –"

It was barely more than a flicker, but Sam had seen it before, that fleeting expression in his brother's eyes and he dropped his gaze, turning to look at Rufus. "We could get over to Tawas, this week; less confusing if the shifter hasn't taken a new form anyway."

"No," Dean said, staring at the floor, his face stony. "We'll go to Michigan. You, me, Elias and Lee. We'll find it, gank it, get rid of it."

He looked up at Bobby. "We need more intel. Maybe Cas can give us that."


	8. Chapter 8 Disaccord

**Chapter 8 Disaccord**

* * *

><p><em><strong>December 31, 2013. Heaven<strong>_

Castiel sat in the main chamber of the library, his head tilted back and eyes almost closed as he reviewed the texts again.

The terms 'text' and 'library' were slight misnomers. The histories and prophecies and compendiums of Heaven were not written on paper or papyrus or leather but on the frequencies of light that poured through the almost transparent building, retrieved by a thought, viewed and studied as they played in harmony, in descant and canto, antiphony and counterpoint, with the harmonic frequencies of the angels themselves.

It should have meant that tampering with those records was impossible, Cas considered as he drifted through symphony and crescendo, fugue and cantata. Of course, the very idea of deceit on the celestial plane was supposed to have been impossible. And yet, he had practised deceit himself, to his closest friends and to his own soulless song, telling himself that he was acting for a greater good when the revelations from his superiors had ordered torture and murder.

The false note was barely discernible, he realised, even when listening for it intently, even after listening for it so many times now. The signature attached to the note was indistinct as well, he thought, leaning forward and closing his eyes tightly. Had it been done in a rush, or was that a part of the deception? The sigil of each angel was unique and unalterable, their own particular collection of notes, not truly a melody but more like a phrase, a poem. He listened to it again, hearing, yet not hearing the slurring at its end, absorbing the difference with senses that were attuned to the flow and flux of energy, translated in a mind that saw all things in terms of harmony and discord.

Opening his eyes abruptly, Cas sat up, staring at the shifting light that filled the chamber as another thought hit him. Was it even possible to _fake_ an angel's signature? He reached out for Gabriel, searching the waves and oscillations throughout the city for the archangel's particular melody, accepting that Gabriel was not on the celestial plane only after he'd looked everywhere twice.

He chewed the corner of his lip unknowingly, stopping as he became aware of what he was doing, and where he'd picked up that habit. The Voice before Metatron had been one of the Powers. He didn't know which one, but any of the seraphim could tell him that.

Getting to his feet, he walked out of the library, that distortion of the final note playing over and over in his mind, as discordant now as the false note that had led him to the text in the first place.

_Cas? Dean to Cas, need you down here … Cas? Got your ears on?_

Cas shook his head, shutting out the voice of the human impatiently. _Not now, Dean_, he thought, increasing his speed as he headed for the towers. A flush of guilt filled him for a moment, and his face twisted into an unconscious, very un-angelic grimace. Whatever it was his friend needed, it would have to wait. He felt as if he was finally closing in on the answers he needed, they all needed, and he couldn't spare the time.

* * *

><p>Looking at the spartan emptiness of the hall, Cas wondered if he had the right place. He touched the door with his fingertips and it dissolved, revealing an almost bare room and the Power waiting for him.<p>

"Zephon," he said, inclining his head politely.

"Castiel, isn't it?" The Power looked at him, stepping back in invitation. "You're the one who was mixed up with humanity and stopping the Apocalypse?"

"Yes," Cas confirmed uncomfortably, stepping inside. "Thank you for agreeing to see me."

"Oh no," Zephon said with a slight smile. "I find it very interesting to meet you, Castiel. A rebel and a warrior who chose his own path? That's truly fascinating, especially for an unranked seraph."

Cas hesitated, uncertain if the edge he thought he heard was really there in the Power's mellifluous tenor voice.

"What is it I can help you with?" Zephon asked, gesturing to the simple pallet by the wall.

Cas looked over at it and shook his head. "I need to know if it is possible to duplicate the signature of another angel."

"Duplicate?"

"Use it as a seal, as if the angel had made it himself?" he clarified. "To suggest that an angel had made something, when in fact he had not."

"To fabricate it? No!" Zephon snapped, his expression changing abruptly from interest to a tightly repressed anger. "No one can duplicate another's essence."

"Not even through a spell – or–?"

"I tell you it is impossible!" The Power spun away from him, wings shivering. "Our sigils are a part of us, no one can copy them or use them for lies or as – as _false witness_ to our doings."

He turned back, golden eyes darkened to amber. "What you speak of, seraph, is heresy, most foul and black a-a-and bordering on – treason!"

Cas looked at him uncertainly. "My apologies, brother, I meant no disrespect. I am trying to discover the art by which the misinformation about the –"

"Our Father made us most holy, such deception is not possible for us! Get out!" Zephon hissed at him, wings rising above his shoulders. "Get out of my presence at once!"

Cas turned back to the door, striding through as it dissolved in front of him. A memory from the past rose in his mind, Dean's voice, deep and slightly amused … _must'a hit a nerve to get that kind of reaction, huh?_ … he thought that his friend was right about that.

Why would the Power be so offended by the suggestion? It cannot have escaped him that deceit was a coin used by many in the celestial city and had been for a long time now.

* * *

><p><em><strong>January 2, 2014. Crows Nest Keep, Kansas<strong>_

The broad, flat shovel dug into the snow with a sharp rasp, and Dean lifted it and threw the load to one side in the same motion, working his way down the path to the road. It was an exercise in futility, he knew, there was another storm forecast for that evening and the snow would be piled up again tomorrow, but it was steady physical work and he needed it, needed the exertion to keep his thoughts from circling like vultures over his fears.

"You could split the wood around the back, if you really want to kill something," Alex called from the front porch.

He stopped and looked around. She was standing on the top step, a soft, plaid blanket wrapped around her from head to foot, looking down at him.

"Woodshed's full," he said, mostly to the path as he dropped his gaze. He hadn't told her about the message from Marc. He couldn't tell her about it.

She walked down the steps, head ducked as she negotiated the wet path toward him.

"What's going on?"

He shook his head. "Just need the exercise," he said, gesturing around the snow-covered yard vaguely. "Two days of sitting inside is driving me nuts."

It wasn't all that far from the truth. The damned angel wasn't answering and he couldn't sit around, doing nothing.

He looked back at her, catching the doubt in her expression before it smoothed away and she nodded and turned away from him, a slight rigidity in her shoulders telling him she didn't buy it. He couldn't tell her why he was lying to her.

_Don't lie to me again._

"Alex," he said softly. She stopped, at the foot of the steps, half-turning to look at him.

"I –" he started, then stopped. "I – I've just got some stuff – stuff I need to work out," he finished uncomfortably. Still not that far from the truth but it didn't matter, did it? If it was an inch or a mile? It was lying and he never had to her.

"Sure," she said, climbing the porch steps. "I'll see you later."

The edge of the shovel drove viciously into the snow and he lifted and threw the soft powder to one side.

He wasn't going through that again. There was no fucking way he was going through it again, or letting anyone – demon, angel or demi-god – put her through it again.

_Cas_, he thought angrily, leaning against the shovel as he looked up at the cold, grey sky. _Where the hell are you!?_

As if in mocking answer, the first few large flakes tumbled weightlessly from the grey cloud. He scowled at them and turned abruptly, walking back along the path that was already being covered again by the settling snow, climbing the steps up to the porch.

From the second he'd seen the uneasiness in Jerome's expression, he'd wanted to get moving, to go and find them and wipe them out, wipe them off the face of the earth so he could feel like the threat was finally gone for good. He'd barely heard Rufus and Bobby's arguments about the _why_ of it, focussing intensely on the _how_ instead, feeling his brother's eyes boring into him as he'd looked at and discarded a dozen possible ways to get there, go berserker and get it done. Sam hadn't had to say it out loud. None of them had. Without the magic mortal to show them where the city of the dead was supposed to be, there was nothing he could do there, even if he could convince the angel for a ride halfway around the world.

Nothing at all.

Jo's tame meteorologist said that this storm would be the last for a week or two, they'd get a deep freeze but no new bad weather. He and Sam were taking the susvee to Tawas in two days' time. If the shifter was still there, there was a good chance they could take it down and at least stop that line from continuing.

* * *

><p>Knocking the crusted snow off his boots on the threshold step, Dean opened the door and walked in, closing the door and loosening the laces of his boots, toeing them off to leave them in the hall. The house was warm, and the thick, soft rugs warmed his feet as he padded down the hall, following the sounds of squealing laughter to the kitchen.<p>

He stopped in the doorway to the room, watching as Alex moved around the table, taking warm pans of pureed vegetables from the stove and spooning the smooth mash into bowls, her hair a tangle of short curls, every shade from maple to wheat. The kitchen was warmed by the big iron range that they'd had been using almost exclusively for cooking, pale green and deep cream walls bright in the buttery glow of the overhead light.

He couldn't bring it to her, couldn't watch that expression of contentment and happiness dissolve into fear, into doubt and uncertainty and pain. The protection surrounding the house, the keep, the town itself, that had seemed so safe before, now felt like cobwebs in the face of a storm. The Grigori had come in through ward and guard and trap. Come in and taken her and Ellen and Kim without difficulty. He knew she remembered the cambion boy and the way he'd just walked in.

James turned his head and caught sight of him, waving a spoon in the air in imperious summoning. Alex looked up, and Dean's breath stopped in his chest for a second, the smile aimed right at him, piercing flesh and bone and hitting him so hard he swayed for a moment, blinking under the impact.

"I think he's asking for you," she said, and the moment passed and he could breathe again and move and think. _I can't do it_, he thought desperately, ducking his head to hide whatever might be showing in his eyes as he walked across the kitchen to the table. _I won't take this contentment away from her and I won't lose it, not again_.

* * *

><p>Heat and softness and the whispered moan of his name that clung and dug into his skin, an ache over every bare, sweat-sheened inch. Muscles trembling and a heavy rhythm thundering in his ears. Lightning inside, touching cluster after cluster of nerves and lighting them up until he couldn't breathe, couldn't hold back the overload, couldn't control the convulsive need and that fierce yearning had him wrapped up tight, heart almost breaking in between, breathing her name on the outward rush of the rumbling sound that had started in his chest.<p>

_This is mine_, he thought incoherently, lost in each deep pulse from him to her, and the thought seemed familiar, from long ago, and it terrified him.

The sky was clear, the stars vanished in the brilliant silver light of a full moon. The light filled half of the bedroom through the open curtains, stealing colour and leaving everything sharply-edged in black and white. It looked cold, that starkness, but the room was warm and they were warm, hair and skin damp and clinging. Opening his eyes as the aftershocks crackled through him, Dean tried to memorise everything in this moment, the shadows of her lashes, the full curves of her lips, parted and moist, the feathery curl that lay over one dark brow, the physical sensations and the feelings that wouldn't dissipate, filling and choking him in their intensity.

She lifted her hand, smoothing it over his cheek and he turned his head, pressing his lips against the palm, feeling the shiver that sputtered through her, ducking his head to stop it. There was a part of him that couldn't get over that she _tasted_ the same, her _scent_ was the same, triggering memories that were too hard to look at, most of the time, not here, not now but out there, when other people were around. Everything was the same but the way she'd been, the way they'd been. _Is it enough?_ she'd asked and he'd said _yes_, but sometimes it wasn't. He didn't know if she did … _still_ … just the way he was.

"What is it?" she asked, her voice very quiet.

His gaze shifted away and he lifted his weight from her, sliding one arm under her and balancing on his hip, skin still touching all down the length of their bodies.

"Nothing, it's good," he said, hearing that lie as loud as the other. "I just … I was thinking that while me and Sam are over at Tawas, maybe it'd be better if you stayed in the order, with Marla."

The silence that followed drew his gaze back to her face reluctantly. She was looking down, he thought, the moonlight casting the shadows of her lashes in thick, black lines over her cheeks.

"No, I'd rather stay here," she said, cautiously casual. "This is our home, and Jerome said he doesn't mind sending the work over."

"Uh, yeah, but …" He tried to find a good reason for the request, a good reason other than the one that had been eating at him since he'd realised that he didn't want her here on her own. "I, uh, it would, uh, just mean that you'd have, you know, help, if you needed it."

Alex shifted up the pillows, looking at him closely. He could feel the wariness in her. "I'll be fine, Billy and Ryan are less than fifty yards away."

She wasn't going to agree unless he told her the truth, he thought, absurdly grateful to the shadow that covered his face. And there was no way he was telling her and then leaving for a couple of weeks, leaving her to worry about it on her own.

"Yeah," he forced himself to agree, hoping that the word had come out less heavily than it had sounded in his mind. "I guess."

She was still looking at him, he could feel her eyes searching his face, trying to pierce the shadow that was hiding his expressions from her.

"Is there anything you're worried about specifically?" she asked a moment later. He looked at her and shook his head.

"Nah, just general worry," he said lightly, wishing like hell he hadn't brought it up now, now when he wanted to sublimate that worry, hold her close, feel the weight go.

"Because," she said slowly. "you've been on edge since you got back from the order."

"That's – that was just, uh, a disagreement with Sam," he said, ducking his head and grazing his lips along the bare curve of her shoulder, feeling the lie lacerate over the raw groove he was making with them. This wasn't what he wanted. He couldn't see a way around it.

He looked up when she didn't respond, feeling his stomach drop as she turned away from him, sliding down the pillows again, the moonlight lighting up one prominent shoulder blade and the indent of her spine.

"Alex," he said, following her across the cooling sheet. "It's not – I just –"

"Jerome said that you found the machine, in Utah," she said abruptly, cutting him off. "You and Sam and Rufus?"

He froze, at the words, at the tone, looking down at her. "Yeah," he said warily. "What about it?"

"I want to see it," she told him, and he saw her shoulder hunch up against the shiver that ran up the muscles along her back.

"I don't think that's a good –"

"I want to see it," she said again, her voice sharp. "When you get back. Alright?"

"Alex…"

The silence that answered him was cold and, he thought, final. So much for trying to protect her. He felt a gut certainty that her going there was not going to be a good idea. He'd talk to Meredyth when they got to Tawas. See what she thought. Then he'd have something to use to try and put her off.

* * *

><p><em><strong>January 10, 2014. Camp Tawas, Michigan<strong>_

Clanking and growling its way over the buried road, the bright red machine crawled up to the gates of the camp as two guards opened them, stepping out and raising their rifles.

"I see the new procedures are in place," Sam said dryly, pulling off his glove and rolling up his sleeve as Dean brought the machine to a halt.

From the gatehouse, Marcus walked out, grinning slightly as he waited for them to get out of the vehicle, holding a bottle, bag and knives. His breath fogged out, freezing in the air and falling to the ground.

"Sorry to pull you out of the nice, warm cab," he said, passing Dean an insulated bottle.

Dean shrugged. Better that they were being commando about the precautions than not. He drank the almost-freezing water and passed the bottle to Sam, hiding a flinch as the frozen metal touched his skin and was lifted away before it could adhere.

"You know if Jo's up? he asked the guard, rolling down his sleeve and dragging the glove back on.

"She's here, we've been over the camp about three times now," Marcus told him.

"Get ready for a fourth," Sam said disparagingly.

"And fifth," Dean added as he pulled himself back into the cab. "Whole damned area's gonna have to be searched."

Marcus nodded and stepped back and the gates swung open for the susvee to clank its way through.

"Think they missed it?" Sam asked his brother as they drove slowly up to the main building.

"I don't know," Dean said, frowning as he tried to remember exactly where the road was, squinting at the churned mass of deep snow and wet slush in front of them. "Did Boze say if the docs had narrowed down anyone who might've got knocked up from it?"

"No, tests haven't been finished yet."

"Well, we'll wait around for those anyway."

If the shifter'd had left straight after Jo had made it, they probably wouldn't have a snowball's of finding it now, he thought. Someone else's face and body and it could've walked back into the woods. He wondered if the lake was frozen. There were people on Swan's Nest Island, to the north of Tawas. They were going to have to check them out as well.

* * *

><p><em><strong>January 12, 2014. Lake West, Michigan<strong>_

"This is worse than _The Thing_," Dean complained, rubbing a hand over his face tiredly as the flashlight beam played over the back corner of the basement.

"At least they only had a limited number of possible copies in that," Sam contradicted, his voice equally weary. "We're looking at thousands."

They'd searched every building in Tawas and here, right down to the cupboards that were big enough for a child to hide in while Sean, Boze, Renee and Seth once again put the populations of the camps through the silver test.

"We'll look at what's left of Sable and Chitaqua tomorrow," Dean said, straightening up as he heard boots coming down the stairs. "And check out the island after that."

Sam nodded, looking around as Ty and Sean came down the steps. "Anything?"

"Nope." Sam shook his head and flicked a glance at his brother. "It's clean."

Dean nodded, following Sam out. "You got a sked with Bobby, Ty?"

"In half an hour," Ty said, looking back over his shoulder.

"How's the rail project going?" Sam asked him curiously.

"Track's fine to Springfield," Ty said, waiting for them at the top of the stairs. "It goes through St Louis, and Steve said he wanted to bypass that, run feeder lines into the city for supply runs but not run our trains through it."

"Too many ghouls," Dean nodded.

"Wraiths and crocottas, along the river now, too," Sean added, shaking his head. "Trip got back to us, last week, said that they'd been ambushed by a group of wraiths."

Sam lifted an eyebrow at Dean. "Hunting in groups?"

Shrugging, Dean answered, "They're moving south, no territory, not much to feed on. We're gonna have to rewrite what we know of a lot of the monsters."

"Good point," Sean said, gesturing around as they walked into the kitchen. "You hungry?"

Sitting at the long, scrubbed table, Dean ate the thick, hurriedly-made sandwiches fast, his gaze flicking to his watch. Ty nodded to them and left, heading up the hallway for the stairs. Sean made a couple of sandwiches for himself from the platters he'd set out.

"Lake's completely frozen," he said through a mouthful. "Got enough depth to use the snow-mobiles for the trip out to Swan's Nest, if you want to go."

"Anyone survive out there?" Sam asked. He'd only heard of the island of exiles a couple of months ago.

"Yeah, they're surviving," the younger man said with a slight shrug. "They fish and hunt, they've built cabins." He looked at Dean, one brow rising. "They want to know if they can come back."

Dean glanced at him as he finished his roll. "Not up to me, that's Boze's call – and Ty's."

"They want your opinion, I think."

They'd been there a little over two years, exiled after trying to take over the camps. People had died. He shook his head.

"Get the docs out, sometime," he said. "See what they think of them. Not my problem anymore."

He got up and turned, walking out of the kitchen and down the hall to the office.

Sean looked at Sam curiously. "What's up?"

Listening to his brother's footsteps as they receded, Sam finished his food and picked up the plates, getting to his feet.

"Too much going on right now," he said to Sean, taking the plates to the sink and turning around. "That's all."

He walked out, turning the opposite way in the hall and heading for the room he'd been allocated. He'd wanted to hear from Bobby as well, but he thought that Dean wanted to talk to the old man – and get patched through to Crows Nest – without an audience. He'd check with the order in the morning instead.

Dean'd been a hundred percent, he thought as he climbed the stairs to the upper level, every minute they'd been here, but the tension that'd lived in him since Jerome had called them to the situation room and delivered the message from the alpha vampire was still present in his brother, and Cas hadn't been answering. Whatever was going on in Heaven, it was taking their one lead's full attention.

He felt a hollow shiver as he stripped off, stepping under the shower to wash away the muck and grime that coated him from the day's searching. Even the order hadn't been proof against the Grigori, and he felt his own tension, worrying at him, despite the fact that he knew no one was after Marla, or Jean, and they were safer there than anywhere else in the world.

Dean had it worse, he thought, getting out and drying himself distractedly. A lot worse, and none of them could think of a way to make it any easier.

* * *

><p>Bobby's voice crackled and broke up then cleared, and Dean leaned back in the chair in relief.<p>

"You hear me, Dean?" the old man's voice said, as clearly as if he were standing in the room and Dean's mouth twitched up to one side.

"Loud and clear," he said, leaning toward the mike again. "Anything happening there?"

"Frozen in," Bobby said sourly. "You find anything in Tawas?"

"Nada. Looks like it skipped out as soon as Jo figured it out."

"Looked everywhere?" The question was couched diplomatically but Dean's nose wrinkled up anyway.

"We're taking a look at the other camps, what's left of them, tomorrow," he said. "Lake's frozen solid so we'll have a look at the island as well."

"Boze said those folks want to come back," Bobby said, making it not exactly a question, just an opening for discussion.

"That's up to Boze and Ty," Dean said, wondering why these kinds of things kept getting dumped back in his lap. He wasn't the leader of the free world anymore. "I'm just a working stiff now."

He heard Bobby's snort over the line. "Sure ya are."

"Can you patch me through to the house, Bobby?" he asked, deciding against getting into that with the old man now. Jackson and Riley were running Lebanon effectively. Boze and Ty and Jo had the camps here going smoothly, had protected them against the attacks they'd had. It was all pretty damned obvious to anyone who wanted to look. He didn't miss it.

"Yeah," Bobby said, recognising the disinclination to talk about the matter further in his voice.

Dean heard the hiss of the radio vanish as Bobby transferred the data line to the phone system, silence then the soft burr of the phone ringing. Steve had said that they'd run a pipeline for a hard line along the tracks while they were doing the repairs. The idea of being able to phone from state to state was novel, it'd been a while since communications had been that easy.

"Hello?" Alex said, her voice as clear as Bobby's had been and he closed his eyes, visualising her standing next to the wall-mounted set in the kitchen.

"Hey," he said, tucking the old-fashioned handset between his shoulder and ear. "How're you doing?"

"Good," Alex said. "Are you okay? Did you find it?"

He frowned a little, the over-brightness in her voice sounded forced. There'd been a … he didn't know what to call it … a distance, maybe … between them when he'd left. Before he'd left. She knew he was lying to her. She hadn't asked why.

"Yeah, I'm good," he said, fingertips rubbing absently over one brow. "We haven't seen anything, might've missed it this time."

"Jerome brought the angelologies over," she said. "I'm looking through them now."

"Find anything?"

"Not yet."

Silence fell between them and he thought of the conversation he'd had with Dr Forsythe about Alex's demand to see the machine.

"_What do you think?" she'd asked him bluntly. He'd shaken his head._

"_I think it's a bad idea."_

"_It might bring it all back," she'd pointed out, her expression neutral._

"_And it might overload whatever she's got in place to deal with it," he'd countered, scowling at her. "You said she could've withdrawn completely."_

_Meredyth had nodded, carrot-red bob swinging forward against her cheeks. "Yeah, that's what I said. Why does she want to see it now?"_

_He'd looked away, chewing on the corner of his lip. "We got a message from the French chapter, a week ago. The alpha vamp found the hunters and told them to tell me that the Grigori are still looking for Alex."_

_Meredyth drew in a deep breath. "For what?"_

"_We don't know," he said, shrugging helplessly. "Not yet. And I've got no way of finding out."_

"_And you didn't want to tell her about it," the doctor guessed shrewdly, watching him drop his gaze to the floor._

"_What good what it do?!" he said, moving away uncomfortably. "Make her worry about something we don't know anything about?"_

"_She knows you're lying to her?"_

_He nodded. "Then she came up with this," he said, gesturing vaguely. "To go see the machine."_

"_She wants it over," Meredyth said softly. "You're not telling her everything, I would imagine she thinks if she has a chance at getting all the memories back, you'll stop lying to her."_

"_What!?"_

_She'd smiled. "Come on, Dean, she feels like you don't trust her, the way things are. Of course it's going to drive her into doing something to change that."_

He hadn't believed it then. Listening to the sub-audible hum on the line, unable to even hear her breathing, he wondered if that was what was going on.

"Alex, I wanted to –"

He heard a wail, somewhere near her.

"Dean, I have to go," she said abruptly, her voice muffled, the handset slipping away from her mouth, the cry louder.

"Is everything okay?"

"Yes," she said, her voice brisk. "James tried standing again and ended up bruising his dignity."

There was a soft murmur and he heard his son's wordless burble.

"I have to go," she said before he could ask or say anything else. He heard the click and then the echoing silence on the line and dropped the phone back onto the rest.

She'd sounded pissed, he thought, getting up from the chair at the desk and walking out of the office slowly. No, not pissed, he amended, going over the conversation, as brief as it'd been, again. Closed off. Shut off. From him.

* * *

><p>The bedroom he'd been given was plain and simple and the bathroom was next door. Glancing at his watch, he thought he'd get about four hours before dawn, and he knew from long experience that a hot shower was going to do him a lot more good than the missed ten minutes of sleep. The pressure was good and the water was hot, and the aches of crawling through what'd seemed like miles of pipe and tunnels through the two big fortified camps eased under it.<p>

_Fucked if you do, fucked if you don't_, he thought, bare feet slapping against the wooden boards of the floor as he walked back into the bedroom and dropped his clothes by the bed, pulling the towel from around his hips and dropping it over the back of a chair. Unlike Kansas, when he turned off the lamp beside the bed, the room was plunged into complete darkness. Liev had been running some street lights through the keeps and along the roads in Lebanon, partly security, partly reassurance for the growing population.

The mattress was a little too soft, the blankets heavier than the down-filled quilts he was used to, and he rolled restlessly onto his shoulder, eyes closed. Listening without realising it.

* * *

><p><em><strong>January 13, 2014. Chitaqua ruins, Michigan<strong>_

"What's to stop them from just walking off when the lake freezes over?" Sam asked, looking up the featureless white plain to the north.

Sean shrugged. "And go where? If we don't take them back in, they're stuck with walking through a bitter winter and starting all over again anyway."

Dean was half-listening to them, eyes on the ground as he walked around the sunken foundations of the cabins, skirting the much deeper and water-filled basement and sub-basement of what had been the main house.

He'd been back, maybe a dozen times, since they'd packed up and left for Kansas. There wasn't much left of the buildings, trees had sprung up through the walls and encroached on the driveway and paths that had led between them. Even the gravel road from town was hard to negotiate now, narrower, pot-holed and corrugated, covered in leaf-fall from the last two winters.

Memories still crowded. He hadn't thought they would, it felt like so much more had happened in Kansas. He stopped by the broken steps that had once led up to the porch, looking down at the ground, remembering the warm darkness of the car and not wanting to stop talking and not being able to ask either.

"Find anything?" Sam's voice broke through that memory and he looked up, shaking his head.

"How long to get out to the island?" he asked Sean.

"Taking it easy, about an hour and a half," Sean said, looking at the row of snow-mobiles they'd come in on. "We've got enough fuel on board to get there and back to Tawas."

"Dean?"

He looked up at the question in his brother's voice. "Yeah?"

"You ready to go?"

"Yeah."

Catching Sam's narrowed look, he walked past them, climbing onto the machine he'd ridden down from Lake West and starting the engine. The high buzzing noise effectively killed any further possibility of conversation and he pulled the tinted goggles up from around his neck, zipping the high-necked jacket at the same time. The wind chill they'd be adding to the already well-below-zero conditions meant that every inch of skin needed to be protected.

It wasn't peaceful, he thought, feeling the skis rising and falling over the humps in the ice through the handle-bars, but it was relaxing in its own way. They stayed apart from each other, jetting up rooster-tails of snow and ice behind them, the small, dark hump on the horizon getting closer steadily. Glancing to his left, he saw his brother, unrecognisable in the heavy winter clothing, and he wondered how the hell they were going to find the shifter amongst even a small population of people they didn't really know, all wrapped in heavy coats, gloves, scarves and hats, faces covered completely.

* * *

><p><em><strong>Litteris Hominae, Kansas<strong>_

Felix looked at the pages in front of him, pulling his glasses off with one hand as he rubbed the bridge of his nose with the other. The warmth of the room and the unvarying light in the library induced a cumulative soporific effect after about twelve hours of sitting there constantly.

The manuscript had been scanned and sent from Lourdes, Francesca's notations covering the margins in a tight, neat hand. From the Vatican vaults, the first mentions of the bloodlines of Christ and the patchwork history the Church had been able to follow once they'd realised that not only one, but two children had been born to two different women who'd spent time with the son of God. Bethany had been overlooked for more than a thousand years.

Had there been a Church left after the failed Apocalypse, he thought, they would have been moving heaven and hell to keep that under wraps. But like everything else that had thought itself eternal and forever, the Church had been reduced to a few far-flung priests who'd somehow retained their faith, no organisation, no authority. He looked across the room at Father McConnaughey and got up from the table, walking stiffly with the folder under one arm to the armchairs in front of the fire.

"I have need of your expertise, Father," he said, sitting down with a muffled groan in the free chair beside the hearth.

"That sounds ominous," the priest said, putting down the book he'd been reading. "What kind of expertise?"

"Theological, at this moment," Felix told him, handing the folder across. "It appears that they discovered the youthful indiscretion more than a thousand years later, but it presents a separate line."

Father McConnaughey's gaze skimmed down the pages, nodding in recognition. "Yes, I believe there was a great uproar about it, at the time. What do you want to know?"

"Those records, they are far from complete," the older man said to him, eyes bright and sharp behind the thick lenses of the glasses. "Even if they were all accurate, which I highly doubt, there are gaps that cannot be researched and filled now."

"The Church thought so too." Father McConnaughey said with a shrug. "Even in the Magdalene line, there are generations missing."

"So we literally cannot accept that the lines either died out as the Church suggests, and we will not be able to find the descendants if they did not."

"It's hard to believe that Heaven would have allowed that knowledge to go unrecorded," Father McConnaughey said thoughtfully, his gaze slipping to the side where the archangel was reading at a small desk.

Metatron looked up, smiling a little. "Heaven did not expect any issue from that bloodline," he said, closing his book and steepling his fingertips under his chin. "It was always believed that, genetically, nothing could be passed on, therefore there was no need to monitor the situation."

"Apparently that was an error in judgement," Felix said dryly.

"Yes, I believe it was," Metatron agreed readily. "By the time efforts were made, at first by my predecessor and then by myself, to find those descendants, the earthly plane had been plunged into a state of chaos. A Gate was opened in Kyrgyzstan and plague was let loose on the population. After many years of bad weather and famine, we lost a huge part of the globe's population in less than two years and it was impossible for either the Church or even Heaven's scholars to determine who'd lived and who'd died."

"The Black Death?" Felix asked, mentally reviewing the years that the disease had moved from Asia to Europe, travelling by land and sea.

"That's what it was known as here," Metatron confirmed. "A large number of demons were released at that time and all those stationed here, as well as several battalions of the Host, were engaged in finding them, sending them back." He shrugged. "There was no one available to follow the bloodlines and see if they had survived or not."

"The text," Felix said, gesturing to the printouts Father McConnaughey held. "suggest that the descendants from both lines were born with a distinguishing mark, a cross in a circle, raised or different in pigment in the skin. Or that they possessed power that normal humans did not."

Metatron shook his head. "So far as I'm aware, there was neither mark nor any kind of power to differentiate the descendants." He looked at the transcript. "May I see it?"

Father McConnaughey's fingers tightened infinitesimally around the pages before he got to his feet and took the pages to the angel. Sam had confided his lack of trust in the angel, the contradictions in Metatron's accounts with those of Castiel. He couldn't find a trust for Heaven's scribe in himself either.

"Thank you," Metatron said, taking the pages from him and setting them on the table. "These are Church documents, yes? From the vaults?"

Felix glanced at the priest as he nodded. "The legacies in the French chapter have been going through them, translating the older documents and sending us what they find."

"You believe that the last scion will somehow lead you to the Angel tablet?"

"The only prophecy we have found that relates to the City of the Dead refers to a mortal whose presence will reveal the location," Felix said with a shrug. "It doesn't speak of the descendant, and it does not speak of the other references we've since discovered of a mortal guardian either. But it seems to border on the fantastical to assume that there are three mortals wandering around, each with a prophecy attached relating to the Word of God as it pertains to celestial instructions."

Metatron looked at him and smiled. "Quite. Coincidence is never quite … coincidence, is it?"

"Not in my experience," Father McConnaughey said with a sigh. "If we can narrow it down to a single mortal, we might have a chance of finding them."

"That mortal might have died, in the upheavals and chaos of the last three years," Metatron suggested mildly.

"God doesn't usually let random accidents take important players from the board before their jobs are completed," the priest said.

"True," Metatron said, looking back at the pages. "But God has not been with us for a long time."

"He is with us every day," Father McConnaughey countered the angel's assertion sharply. "He sent Sam back. I was there at the time."

He saw the angel still, his expression frozen. That certainly got his attention, he thought curiously. Did the archangels really believe that God had disappeared for good? Was Cas right about the motivation for all these plots?

"Did you have a rough location for the City of the Dead?" Metatron asked, his voice steady, a little thicker than it had been, the priest thought.

"No, not really," Felix said, glancing at Father McConnaughey again. "One of our colleagues worked on a dig, near the border of Jordan. He'd uncovered what seemed to be angel and nephilim skeletal remains, which were suggestive of the battle accounted in the early prophet's texts, but it is just a possibility."

"Which colleague would that be?" Metatron turned to look at him.

Felix sighed gently. "Davis Cutland," he said. "He was killed when the Grigori attacked us."

Father McConnaughey saw the angel's eyes narrow slightly as he shook his head. "I'm sorry to hear that. Did he leave the co-ordinates for that battle? Or any documentation about it?"

"Do you know of the battle, Metatron?" Father McConnaughey asked, trying to keep the pointed edge from his voice.

"No," the angel said, turning to him. "I had Fallen. I was not privy to the knowledge of where the Qaddiysh took the tablets or what followed their hiding."

"I think Davis documented everything," Felix said, frowning as he tried to remember what had happened to the information. "The attack on the order left us in disarray for some time, but Frances or Marla would probably know where it was filed."

"Do you mind if I take this, read over it at leisure?" Metatron asked Felix, holding up the transcript pages.

"Not at all, the more the merrier working on this, so far as I'm concerned," the scholar said tiredly. "That's a copy anyway. I have another."

"Thank you."

The scholar and priest watched him rise from the table, gathering his books and the notes in his arms.

"He seems to be lacking in faith, for an angel," Felix said to Father McConnaughey quietly when he'd left the library.

"He does, doesn't he?" Father McConnaughey agreed thoughtfully. "And he got quite excited about the location of the battle."

"Was I wrong to give him the information?" Felix asked, watching the priest's face.

"No, Felix. We're running out of time, I feel that strongly," Father McConnaughey said softly, turning to look at him. "Angels have all the time in the world, but we mortals need to hurry things along when we can. I think he'll do something to show us his allegiance one way or the other in the next day or two."

"What about the books?"

"What did Mitch say about digitally scanning them?"

"He thinks he'll need at least a couple of hours," Felix said, remembering the young man's enthusiasm for the proposal.

"Let's go and talk to Oliver about what he might have to put an angel into a slightly deeper sleep than normal."

* * *

><p><em><strong>Swan's Nest Island, Lake Huron<strong>_

The darkness of the pine woods that covered almost half of the island were a contrast to the brilliance of the snow in the thin sunshine, making it nearly impossible to see the cabins before they were on top of them.

Sam looked around the small camp warily as they walked down the slope. A large log building took up most of the cleared space, added to over time. To either side, dozens of smaller cabins were dotted around the clearing and built within the tree line surrounding it; most of them, he thought, looking at the dimensions critically, no more than a single room.

They stopped when a small group of people emerged from the front door of the largest building, ages and sex indeterminate beneath the layers of fur and roughly woven clothing.

One of them walked down the steps toward them, a thick black beard covering most of his face.

"Winchester, isn't it?" he said, stopping and looking at Dean.

Dean nodded, looking past him to the three others who'd walked slowly up behind him.

"I'm Mac," the man said, glancing over his shoulder at the two men and one woman standing behind him. "That's Brian and Dillon, and Naona."

"We're looking for the shifter, Mac," Sean said, gesturing around the camp. "Need to get all your people tested."

Mac looked at him steadily for a moment, then turned his gaze back to Dean. "We've served our time, we want to come back."

"Not my call anymore," Dean said to him. "I'm just here to find the shifter."

"Yours is the word that counts," Mac said, straightening up slightly. "With the camps."

Shaking his head, Dean glanced at Sean. "Not anymore, man. You talk to Boze and Ty, not me."

"It wasn't even us who organised it," the woman said bitterly from behind the men. "We don't have a teacher, no doctor, just a half-trained nurse, no medical supplies or books –"

"You gonna get your people together so's we can test them, or not?" Dean said to Mac, ignoring her.

He'd returned to the camps from the recce in Atlanta to find that Terry and Father Michael had been killed, along with a dozen or so of the new people who'd come in from the Boulder rescue, Boze fuming over Renee being held hostage, Rufus and Bobby waiting for him to make a decision about what to do with the couple of hundred people who'd taken over Tawas and Sable. He hadn't found out what Alex had done until later. Much, much later.

_I've killed two men in cold blood, Dean_, she'd said, shaking against him in the darkness. He'd held her tightly and told her what he'd told his brother, what he'd told himself, dealing with the deaths that lay on him. She hadn't spoken about it again.

For a long moment, the man faced him without speaking, then he nodded resignedly, stepping back and turning to the three behind him.

"Get everyone into the hall, no exceptions," he told them. Dean flicked a glance at the woman as she threw a dark glare at him before turning on her heel and heading for the other end of the camp.

"How many are here?" Sam asked.

"A hundred and sixty people," Mac said, gesturing to the log building. "Winter's been bad."

Dean looked at Sean. "Get Meredyth and Ray out here, while the lake's frozen. If they're happy to take them, you're better off having them with you than turned or desperate," he said to the younger hunter in a low voice. "I'll tell Ty and Boze when we get back."

Sean nodded. They'd been worried about the population since the werewolf attacks. It wasn't his call but he was glad that Dean was going to speak for these people.

* * *

><p>"None of them?" Dean asked Sam as he heard his brother's distinctive footfalls behind him. Leaning on the railing of the porch, he looked at the endless white of the lake. He couldn't shake off the chill that was filling him.<p>

"Nope," Sam said, stopping at the doorway and looking into the grey twilight that was covering the lake. "Mac confirmed everyone in camp is there and accounted for."

"Think it went the other way?"

Sam shrugged, running his hands through his hair as he considered the possibilities. "Maybe, lake's frozen, it could be anywhere."

"Meredyth thought the results would be in by the time we get back there," Dean said.

Every woman had been tested for pregnancy as soon as Renee had realised what the shifter had been there for. Thirty had tested positive. All of them had undergone the additional blood and urine tests, but both doctors had agreed that the difference might only show up with something called an amnio, and they couldn't do that for another twelve weeks.

"But chances are we won't know for another three months?"

"That's what they said."

Neither wanted to talk about what the women involved would think, carrying the children for so long and then finding out they were bearing a monster. Neither could get it completely out of their heads.

"You want to stay here tonight or get back to Tawas?" Sam asked a few minutes later, stretching up.

"Get back tonight," Dean said shortly. They could head back to Kansas tomorrow. He couldn't get away from the tension that rose with every day he wasn't home.

"You gonna talk to Boze about these people?" Sam asked, turning to look at him.

"Yeah," Dean said, glancing back at the door of the building. "They're looking at a big dead-end here, for everything. Boze might not want 'em in the camp, but they could probably be put on the farms."

"I talked to Kenny yesterday, when I was doing the sweeps," Sam said diffidently. "They could use the extra labour, but he thinks that the growing season this year is going to be shorter than last year's was, and if they can't find crops that can handle that better, it might be that the farms, at least, need to move further south."

Dean ducked his head and grinned humourlessly at the floor. "He talk to Ty and Boze about it?"

"Every day since the first snowfall, apparently."

"Then it's their decision."

"Hard work moving all those people out and building new accommodation that's as well protected as what they're in now," Sam said, gesturing in the direction of Tawas.

"They'll have to figure out something," Dean agreed. "Food's not exactly negotiable."

* * *

><p><em><strong>Camp Tawas, Michigan<strong>_

The long living area of the main building in the camp was empty except for them, the fire crackling on the enormous hearth, and most of the lights turned off, a couple of lamps on the end tables of the big sofas still lit, throwing the rafters into geometric patterns of light and dark.

Dean set the empty plate on the low table in front of him and looked at Boze.

"I said I'd talk to you, and I have," he said. "That's it for me."

"Alright," Boze said, a wry grin creasing his face. "Fair enough."

"No sign at all of the shifter, anywhere?" Renee asked as she leaned forward and picked up their dishes.

"None," Sam confirmed, hiding a yawn behind his hand. "I'm guessing even with my brother's mug, it couldn't have gotten all thirty positive, but it'll be back if it thinks the pregnancies will go to term."

"Which is my question," Ray said, looking from Sam to Boze. "Do we tell these women?"

"We have to, Ray," Meredyth said, leaning back in the chair. "We can't let them think it's all normal and fine."

Boze looked at them and shrugged helplessly. "This isn't my call. It's up to the women, surely? You'll be able to tell, definitely I mean, when you can do the tests?"

"We don't know that, Boze," Ray said, glancing at his colleague. "We'd really have to run chromosome tests, DNA tests, to be completely sure about it, and you know we can't do that."

"So, even if we tell them everything, they still might have a monster in nine months' time?"

"It's a possibility," Meredyth said. "And there's a danger in full disclosure, as you all know."

"Whatever else you decide," Dean said. "You gotta deadline of nine months and it'll probably be back, if it's looking to take the kids."

"You don't think it's going to be like a cuckoo?" Sean looked over at him. "Leave them to be raised as humans?"

"I don't know," Dean said, grappling again with the distant memories of Rebecca's comments. "The only person we got some firsthand info from was a long time ago. She said that the shifter she was talking to said it'd known from a young age that it was different. Guessing that Daddy Shifter is gonna know his kids are going to feel that difference."

"And leaving them to grow up in a compound full of silver and hunters isn't exactly a survival move either," Sam pointed out.

"In any case, there's nothing we can do to track down this thing," Dean said, looking from Sean to Boze. "And right now, even if we can find it, there's no guarantee that silver, straight to the heart, is going to be enough to kill it."

"You boys heading out in the morning then?" Boze said, pushing away the unpalatable thought of waiting the monster out.

"Yeah, we'll go early." Dean nodded and looked at his brother.

* * *

><p><em><strong>January 15, 2014. India<strong>_

The monstrous river broke up into thousands of smaller waterways in an area of marsh and swamp that stretched out for hundreds of miles, the vast delta meeting the warm waters of the Bay of Bengal far to the south. Camael looked around the humid, insect-laden, saturated islet in distaste, his hand curled tightly around his brother's shoulder.

"Move," he told Amaros, pushing him forward.

The _Irin_'s hands were bound in black ribbon, dragged down by lead and gold seals, chaining not only his flesh but the power still left in him. He straightened, catching his balance and walking forward into the circle of white tents, long red hair lying lank and dulled over his shoulders.

"Where are the others?" Yuan Sing came out of the closest tent, lifting the flap and layers of mosquito cloth, a floor-length gaudily embroidered silk robe swirling around his feet as he walked to them. Amaros lifted his head to look into the dark, almond-shaped eyes of his fallen brother. Jet-black hair, smooth and straight as watered silk, gleamed as brightly as the robe.

"There are no others," Camael said coldly. "He knows the location of two tablets. That work is more to your taste than to mine."

The Grigori smiled, exposing teeth that were filed to points, yellowing like old ivory. "And the tablet that holds the secrets of the children of the Mother?"

"Its location is lost." Camael said, ducking under the tent flap and looking around the interior. Cushions provided the furnishings, the jewel-coloured silks muted in the light diffused through the white canvas walls. "Where is the machine?"

"Franz and Uelen have taken it higher, through the mountains. We'll meet them in Persia," Yuan said, gesturing to the low table in the centre of the tent. Camael stared at the two humans cowering by one wall.

"How certain are you that this woman is the right one?" he asked, turning back to the necromancer.

"Completely certain," Yuan said. "The demons who witnessed what she did reported to the crossroads demon on Lucifer's command. The power was untrained but complete. The Morningstar knew who she was."

"Why then didn't Julian keep one of the damned copies instead of killing them all?" the archangel snapped.

"You'd have to ask him," Yuan said with a shrug. "He said that the first copy was imperfect, the effects of the children she carried tainting it somehow."

"Since he's long dead, I cannot ask him," Camael said, turning away, his wings rising agitatedly and folding back against him as he regained control of his emotion. He looked down at the _Irin_ at his feet. "I have an errand I must see to. You have four days to get the information from him."

"There are no restraints?"

"No, there are none," Camael said, his voice cool. "I need those locations. We need all five tablets."

"The humans have one."

"I am aware of that." The archangel looked at the Grigori without expression. "When we have the others, I will take you and the cambion there. Both the tablet and the woman can be taken at the same time. And that machine had better not be stuck in some snow-filled pass in the mountains when the time comes," he added warningly.

"You will be wielding the power of our Father, Camael," Yuan said considering the tall, golden-haired angel in front of him. "Are you certain you will be able to return us to the celestial city?"

He saw the shift of the archangel's gaze, barely a flicker to one side and back. "You will be returned and everything will be restored, exactly the way it was supposed to be," Camael promised, his lip curling. "And that is all you need to know."

Yuan looked down at Amaros as the angel disappeared, the rustle of wings drowning out the faint crack the air made as it filled the space.

"My brother, times have certainly changed when it is possible for us to be so at odds with each other," he said.

Amaros lifted his head, jade-green eyes meeting the dark brown of the Grigori's. "Camael has no intention of returning you to Heaven."

"Yes, that is the impression I received as well," Yuan said, nodding. "He has grander plans, does he?"

"He will begin the Second War and bring down the pillars of Heaven."

The fallen angel laughed. "Will he? And what does he hope to gain from that?"

"He thinks that our Father will return to look after us," Amaros said, looking down at the ribbons tying his hands.

"Well, I suppose everyone needs something to believe in," the Grigori said disparagingly, turning to beckon to one of the women against the wall. "Fetch Fatima, at once."

He looked back at the _Irin_. "I should tell you, brother, that Fatima has mastered the arts of torture to a degree that I believe outdoes even Lucifer's imaginative exploits." He paused for a moment, then bent, taking a handful of the long copper-bright hair and jerking Amaros' head back. "Pain exists here on this plane in enormous abundance, brother. Tell me the locations of the tablets and I will grant you a swift death."

Amaros looked up at him calmly. "That secret goes to the grave with me, brother. I will not tell you."

Releasing him, Yuan shrugged casually. "Well, we'll see."

* * *

><p><em><strong>I-70W, Missouri<strong>_

The ice-glazed trees to both sides of the broad road kept the direction obvious, and Dean stared at the smooth expanse of unbroken white, unconscious of his eyes and hands and feet handling the road and the vehicle as he wrestled with the questions of first-born creatures and encroaching cold and the location of the angel tablet, and under all of that, the unresolvable questions of how much he was destroying without realising it, with the lies that were cutting them apart.

Beside him, Sam stretched out his legs in the comfortable well and slid a sidelong glance at his brother's stony profile, recognising the signs of internal struggle well enough.

"I asked Marla to marry me," he said abruptly, watching the words slowly filter through Dean's thoughts and their comprehension manifest in a flickering sideways look.

"Yeah?"

"Don't strain anything."

"No, man," Dean said, turning to look again at Sam's expression. "I'm – it's just – well, it's a surprise, is all."

Sam nodded. It was that. "I figured things aren't going to get better, why keep telling myself that it's a good idea to wait when it's probably not."

"Huh." He looked at the road. "And that seems like a good reason to get married?"

"It wasn't a good reason not to," Sam corrected him, an edge along his voice. "What?"

"Nothing," Dean shook his head. "If that's what you want, then I'm glad. When's this happening?"

"When it thaws," Sam said. "Spring. I was hoping you'd … uh, you know."

"Yeah, sure," Dean agreed, following his brother's unspoken request without needing to think about it. "So, uh, full rigmarole, huh?"

"Well, within what we can manage."

"Uh, I should be saying congratulations, shouldn't I?" Dean looked over at him again. "I mean it, Sammy. I'm glad."

"Thanks."

Sam looked at his brother's profile, wondering what exactly was going through his mind. He hadn't expected a brass band, but he thought Dean's reactions had been too muted, even for him.

"You know, we're a hell of a lot better protected now," he said cautiously. "Than we were before, I mean."

Dean nodded distractedly. "Yeah, we are."

"And, um, Hell's all locked up tight now, so it's not like anyone can bring an army against us."

Frowning, Dean looked at him. "Okay, what?"

"I'm just saying that we can look after people better now," Sam said, spreading his hands a little.

He saw his brother's jaw tighten, the muscle leap into prominence. "Most of them, sure."

"There's nothing else you can do, not right now," Sam pointed out.

Dean shook his head impatiently. It wasn't about that. At least, it wasn't _all_ about that, he thought.

"I didn't tell Alex," he said, his gaze fixed ahead. "Didn't tell her what the vamp said."

Sam straightened up in the seat, staring at him. "Why not?"

"I didn't want her to worry about it happening again," Dean said, his voice holding a thread of defensiveness. "She's – she's doing okay …"

The words trailed off because that wasn't exactly true anymore either. Sam saw his expression close off, lips thinning out.

"She knows you're lying to her?" he guessed, beginning to understand what the tension of the last two weeks had been about.

"Yeah, seems like," Dean admitted heavily.

"And?"

"And what?"

"And," Sam drew out the word slowly, irrationally irritated at his brother's obtuseness, or evasion. "what are you doing about it?"

"What am I supposed to do about it?" Dean snapped. "Tell her that the fucking Grigori are still after her? Tell her they think she's some kind of blood relation to Christ?"

"You don't trust her?"

He looked around, staring at Sam. "What? I'm just trying to pro–"

"No, I get what you're trying to do," Sam said, his brow wrinkling up as he looked at his brother's face. "But did you stop to ask if she _wants_ you to protect her? 'Cause, she didn't when you were turned, she didn't listen to me or Ellen, she wanted to be there, with you."

Dean didn't respond to that and Sam watched his face smooth out, expressionless again.

"She doesn't remember a lot of what happened and I'm guessing that she's putting a lot of trust in you," he continued. "She's not a part of the keep organisation anymore, and she doesn't have much to do with the order, so it's not like she's getting information from anyone else. And you have to ask yourself, how does it come across to her that you're suddenly tense and on edge and _lying_ to her?"

He paused to let that sink in. "'Cause if it was me, it wouldn't seem much like protecting her, it would seem like you didn't trust her."

The engine growled and the tracks clanked over the ground. In the cab, the silence between them stretched out. Sam looked out the window. There was no point in hammering the point further. He'd been on the receiving of Dean's ill-judged attempts to protect those he loved from things he thought he could deal with himself. It'd never worked, not between them.

* * *

><p>"You want to stop for the night or keep going?" Dean asked.<p>

Sam blinked and looked around, speech after the silence of the last two hours sounding odd over the purely mechanical noise in the cab.

"Keep going, I'll take a shift if you need it," he said, glancing around and down at the map. "Another ten or twelve hours?"

"'Bout that," Dean said, slowing the vehicle down.

They got out, stretching backs and shoulders and necks and walked around the vehicle, climbing back up into the cab and settling into new positions. Sam felt the tracks grip the snow and glanced over the controls.

"Alex wants to see the cloning machine in Utah," Dean said, apropos of nothing, as Sam flicked the lights on and the world narrowed suddenly to a circle of bright snow-covered road.

Sam nodded, feeling his brother's surprised gaze on him, both at his acceptance of the new topic and his understanding of it.

"Sounds like you didn't leave her many options," he said, with a slight shrug.

Dean ignored that, uncomfortably reminded of the red-haired doctor's opinion. "Meredyth said it was a fifty-fifty chance."

"That she'd remember everything, or …?"

"Or that it'd be an overload," Dean told him, turning to look out the window.

_One that maybe she wouldn't come back from_, Sam thought, a glance in the mirrors showing the snow being spat out behind them, lit to bloody red by the taillights. He looked back at the road in front of them.

In some ways, he thought he knew his brother better now than he ever had before. After Atlanta, they'd talked more openly than they had since the year after Jess' murder. And on the hunts and journeys of the last few months, he'd figured out some ways to get Dean to talk about things, or around them. Before, one or the other had to be desperate to get out what they'd really felt.

"What do you know about what she remembers?" he asked now, hoping to circle the subject at a safe distance first.

Dean leaned his head against the glass of the window beside him, looking at the road without seeing it.

"She remembers some stuff from Chitaqua, she said, things like the Christmas lights, just bits and pieces. She doesn't know when they happened," he said, rubbing a hand over his forehead as he tried to remember the conversations they'd had about it. "She remembers more from Lebanon – she remembered some of the harvest, and when she found out she was pregnant, and, uh, she remembered the attack on the keep, seeing the explosives, seeing the half-breed boy."

"Did she say if she remembered the apartment, living there with you?"

"Some of it," Dean said, a little reluctantly. He didn't want to get into details with Sam. "Bits of events, nothing whole." He turned to look at his brother's profile. "Why?"

"She asked you to stay," Sam said, keeping his voice light, reasonable. "She must have remembered enough to have wanted it to work out."

He glanced sideways again when Dean didn't respond. "You can't protect her from knowing about something that might affect her, Dean. She isn't Lisa – or Cassie," he said, remembering the girl he'd thought his brother had been in love with, remembering how the tough exterior had fallen apart when the things she hadn't believed in had turned up on her doorstep. "Alex knows what can happen, and she isn't going to run and hide from it."

He turned to look at him. "Or are you really afraid that she'll think it's not safe to be with you, and leave?"

Dean didn't answer, and Sam looked back through the windshield, wondering if he was pushing too hard, wondering if Dean still felt the old fear. The fear of being left.

* * *

><p><em><strong>January 17, 2014. Arkhangel'sk, northern Russia<strong>_

Danielle looked around and swung her rifle up in the air, moving forward through the heavy powder. In the early twilight, the remaining shells of the brick and stone buildings were tinted bloody and the snow that covered them stained with red.

"Anything?" Kelly pressed a gloved hand through the layers of Gortex and fur surrounding his neck, feeling the throat mike just under his Adam's apple. A hiss of static in his ears and then he heard Jack.

"No, it's empty," the young hunter said, moving from his position on the bank of the river. "Not even ghouls."

"Cold enough to freeze anything without shelter," Kelly remarked. "The sea ice looks thick."

"Where do you want to set up camp?" Perry's voice crackled over their comms. He was leading the reindeer and the sled up through the streets behind Kelly.

"Dan? You got a safe place for us?" Kelly asked.

"Yeah, you can't miss it," she said, a faint amusement in her voice. "Down by the river, north a half a klick from you, Jack. Four turrets."

Kelly smiled into the furs surrounding his face. "I know it," he responded, gesturing behind him to Perry. "We'll see you there in ten."

"Affirmative."

* * *

><p>The building wasn't very large, but the last of the sun's rays caught the gold plating visible here and there through the crusted snow on the Byzantine domes that marked the corners of the roof, dazzlingly bright. Jack climbed the bank and walked between the thick stands of birch, looking past the building at the frozen river beyond it.<p>

Inside, the high-ceilinged rooms still held the ornate plasterwork and chandeliers, covered in ice and dust. He followed the sounds of voices.

"Picked the fanciest one you could find?" he asked Danielle as he walked into the room they'd chosen, deep in the interior of the building, knocking the powder snow from his boots at the doorway.

"Most visible," she said with a grin, looking up at him from the other side of the fire.

Perry came into the room, pulling off his overcoat and shaking snow from his hair. "Reindeer are settled," he said to Kelly. "Do we leave them loose here?"

The older hunter nodded. "We'll be going across the sea ice from here to Novaya Zemlya, as soon as the French hunters turn up. The wreck is off the south-western tip."

"What makes you so sure the ice is frozen all the way across?" Perry asked, sitting by the fire.

Kelly smiled. "Bering was. And ask Jack about the levels in the river."

From the other side of the fire, Jack nodded uncomfortably. "A long way down. Water had to go somewhere."

* * *

><p><em><strong>January 18, 2014. Litteris Hominae, Kansas<strong>_

Father Emilio closed his eyes and stretched, feeling the crack and pop of his joints, the ache that ran from the base of his skull down between his shoulders. Only a couple of the lamps were still lit in the library, the fire had almost died down to embers. He straightened up, setting the book he'd been reading aside and looked around the silent, gloom-filled room.

On the other side of the second long table, the archangel was still there, reading from a pile of folders, all printed with the unicursal hexagram that marked the order's files. It was difficult to tell if Metatron was more human than angel, the Jesuit thought, he seemed to sleep little, keeping to himself and eating in his room, his presence almost permanently in the library, by the fire or at the tables, reading.

Getting up, he walked past the table, nodding as the angel looked up and continuing past the table to the hall. He climbed the stairs, turning right at the first landing and walking along the long, straight hallway to his room. His eyes were aching as fiercely as his neck, and he was no closer to an understanding of the prophecy that referred to the mortal who had been seen to part the desert sands and reveal the hiding place of the tablet.

Angels had fought the nephilim and God had sent a sandstorm, obviously angry enough with his sons to wipe the location from map and memory. To protect the tablet? Or to punish the seraphim? Uriel had led the battalion, on Raphael's command. The archangel had been demoted for two thousand years for the transgression. He wondered if that was recorded in the angelologies the order had sent to Alex.

He undressed in the dark of the room, crawling tiredly into the bed and letting out a long exhale as he found a comfortable position. He needed to see her, he thought. She had not stood in the way of the Winchesters in the matter of the trials. Was she the last living descendant from the union that no one would admit had occurred? Was it she who could command the sands to reveal the city of the dead? He closed his eyes, letting his thoughts drift. In the silent darkness of his mind's eye, memory prodded imagination, throwing out an image. A man who becomes the heart of a star. What did that mean? How was it possible? A star's heart was gas under enormous pressure. A man was … flesh and blood. He struggled to hold onto the image as sleep dragged him down.

* * *

><p>Metatron listened to the sounds of the Jesuit walking down the hall and up the stairs, his eyes half-closed and his senses spreading out through the building. He was the only one still awake.<p>

Under his forearm, lying on the polished surface of the table, the folder containing Davis Cutland's notes on the dig in western Iraq was open to the map showing the co-ordinates where the angel bodies had been found – and re-buried. It was close enough, he thought. Close enough for him to be able to use the spell the legacy had used. His own sigil would call to him and he would find the tablet.

The order was silent and still, every man, woman and child within its wall sleeping deeply. Closing the folder, he gathered the files together and pulled the roughly woven string bag at his feet to the table, opening it and settling the files in between the thick books he'd written. Winchester had been calling to the angel, and that was a meeting he did not want, his brother, even so lowly ranked as the seraphim was, would see the deception in his heart quickly and easily. He had what he needed, and he had the spell ball that would guide Camael back to him.

He closed the bag and pulled the straps over his shoulders, looking around the shadowy room briefly. He hadn't thought the order would survive. But they had. He would come back here, not as a barely-tolerated guest but as a conqueror, he thought. It held all the stories he could ever want.


	9. Chapter 9 Scars, Bones and Secrets

**Chapter 9 Scars, Bones and Secrets**

* * *

><p><em><strong>January 22, 2014. East Keep, Kansas<strong>_

The overcast sky had dimmed the day to a smoky, diaphanous twilight and Alex rubbed her eyes tiredly, moving the lamp a little closer to the files open in front of her. The bound pages of the note book beside her were filled with her neat, backward slanting hand-writing, and she leaned back, repressing a yawn as she picked it up, skipping back several pages and starting to review what she'd written.

She'd been surprised to find the vast and somewhat convoluted histories of Heaven had seemed easy to follow, had almost had a faint familiarity, as if she'd read them before. Perhaps she had, she thought, pushing her fingers through the tangled curls that fell onto her forehead absently. Both Dean and Jerome had commented that she'd been looking through many of the order's texts and files before … before.

There were nine classes, or choirs, of angels, although their powers and responsibilities tended to be confused in some writings and overlapped in others. Both of the priests at the order had told her that different religions had altered the histories to suit themselves, the files that Jerome had sent over had been corrected many times throughout the centuries but were still only the best guess of the humans who'd studied the Spheres of Heaven.

The seraphim, the cherubim and the ophanim formed the first Sphere, intercedents with humanity and counsellors to those who would listen. The second Sphere, comprising of the Dominions, Virtues and Powers, governed Heaven, the orderly progression of the universe and oversaw the lines of Destiny. The third Sphere was dominated by the Principalities, those of the Seventh Choir who guarded and guided the angels; the Archangels, and the Angels of the Throne, the Ninth Choir, those who spoke to God.

The angel, Castiel, had spoken of himself as a seraph, she thought, lowest-ranked of the hierarchy. Of the highest, only Michael and Gabriel still stood as Angels of the Throne, and only three other archangels had survived the rising of Lucifer and his death – Camael, Sariel and Metatron, although before he'd vanished, the Scribe had told Jerome he was no longer an angel at all.

Skimming down the notes, she stopped at the lists of those who'd held the position of Scribe and Voice, wondering sceptically where the order had come by that information. The notations in the file referred to a messenger visitation, the most common euphemism for angel-meddling on earth. Prior to Camael, Metatron had been the Scribe and he had taken down the instructions on the tablets that were being sought by angels and humans and fallen, across the world. She'd only seen the fallen archangel once at the order, and his cool, dispassionate stare had reminded her of a reptile's, uninvolved and uncaring.

Before Metatron, the position had belonged to Zephon, a Power from the second Sphere, who'd passed on the Word to the seraphim, and occasionally directly to humanity, for the previous forty thousand years. Zephon had been the teacher of Raphael, Lucifer, Uriel and Azazel, she saw, circling the names as they leapt out at her. Michael had taught the others, and there was no mention in the histories of who his teacher had been.

The First War had begun after Lucifer had been cast out of Heaven by God, for the sin of pride in refusing to bow to Adam. Or, she thought, a little sardonically, whichever poor human sap Michael had dragged up to Heaven to represent the first of mankind.

That war, between angel and angel, had devastated the country between southern Turkey and what might have been northern Arabia, and all the legends and myths that had grown up around its telling had suggested that those lands, predominantly desert now, had been wept over by God. When the rain had ceased, and God had turned his face from his Creations, it had never come again in such abundance.

Or, she considered, unable to help the same thread of cynicism, the climate bands had shifted as agriculture had removed the vegetation and the patterns of rainfall had moved north.

Her scepticism felt automatic. In actuality, she wasn't sure what to make of those legends. Renee had told her that after an angel had passed over the world, destroying everything in its path that hadn't been marked, the rains had come and things had started to grow out of control. She had a single memory of holding a dying man in her arms, watching a seed sprout and grow up at a rate many times faster than normal, her face and hair wet, her throat tight with grief.

Putting the notes down, and stretching her neck, Alex got up and walked through the darkened rooms to the kitchen, listening for any noise from the bedrooms. The children had been sleeping for almost an hour, she thought they'd wake in another. She emptied the remains of the morning coffee pot, rinsing it out and refilling it, spooning coffee into the machine absently as she thought about the archangel the oldest of the texts called the Lightbringer.

Both Renee and Bobby had told her that she'd seen him, possessing Sam, in the city in the south. No memories had come back to her of that, and what Dean had told her about the angel who'd ruled Hell had been dry and completely without resonance, or any kind of emotional connection. The impressions she had was of a spoiled, petulant creature, a child wanting nothing more than the ruination of what his father had built. It was hard to reconcile with the equally dry memories of society's view of the Devil. Dean had told her he'd taken an army to Atlanta to defeat him and had killed the angel himself.

What she'd lost, the memories that weren't there any more, might have given her more understanding of the man who'd done that. What she'd seen, here with him, was mostly an enigma. She felt his gaze on her, when he thought she wasn't aware of him, felt him looking, she thought, for the person she'd been. Neither of them could really trust in the other. The thoughts were not new, not revelatory and she pushed them aside impatiently, looking at the slowly percolating coffee pot and forcing herself to think about angels and wars on earth and those who had fallen.

That first battle, between Lucifer and his followers, and Michael, commanding the Host, had been bad enough to have been recorded in the Sumerian and Akkadian texts the order held, in the ancient clay sheets that had been safe-guarded in the vaults of the Vatican. The people had fled, from the war, from the famine and drought and pestilence that had followed it.

When the earth had closed over Lucifer and his guard, things had settled down somewhat in both Heaven and on earth, according to the angelologies, at least. God had made a request to twelve angels, to Fall with their Grace and guide humanity. Nearly fifty others, Fallen but without the blessing of their Father, had settled in the ruined lands and had, over time, become known as the Others, their history and that of the Watchers becoming tangled and indistinct in human knowledge and memory by the middle ages when they'd become the Grigori.

A stuttering image of a man, with pale blond hair and cold blue eyes filled her mind for a moment, and she started, stumbling backward and reaching out behind her to catch the lip of the counter and steady herself.

_I need very little from you. But I'm afraid you will suffer._

The words came back and the voice, a tenor voice with a guttural accent, German, perhaps. She felt a deep shiver run through her and she turned, leaning on the counter until it'd passed. At the very edges of her thoughts, where things could hide for years until something jogged them loose, she thought there was a memory of pain.

Beside her, the coffee pot bubbled softly and she looked at it, straightening up and taking down a clean cup from the cupboard above.

It occurred to her, not for the first time, that Dean might've been right about the advisability of regaining all of her memories. There were some, she thought, that she would not want to see again. Not want to _feel_ again.

The downside was that if she didn't … she didn't think he would ever trust her. She would always see that combination of worry and sadness in his eyes, his feeling that what he'd had, what they'd had, was gone forever, she thought, her knuckles whitening as she gripped the cup.

No matter what it cost, she didn't want to live that way. The fragmented memories of him, almost stripped of the emotions that had accompanied them, tantalised her with a promise of something worth any cost to regain, not just for him, not just for herself but for the children they'd created between them as well.

The pot hissed and she pushed the contradictions down and away, filling her cup and heading back to the living room and the table she was using as a desk. Setting down the cup to one side and sitting down, she picked up her notes and kept reading.

The angels had continued to conspire, pride and anger festering in Heaven even with Lucifer's banishment, and it was Raphael, Uriel and Azazel who'd done the conspiring, she thought. Had it been their own idea? Or someone else's? Someone they'd all trusted and believed?

She picked up her pen, adding her speculations to the notes and staring at the file. If there had been a leader, someone who'd pushed and pulled at the others, only an angel could tell them. She knew the angel, Castiel, hadn't answered Dean's prayers before he'd gone to Tawas. She wondered if he would hear and come when Dean returned.

On the other side of the table, another stack of files waited. They were copies of all the reports, prophecies, accounts and notations the order had been able to find on the mortal called the Sentinel. She moved the angel files aside, piling them neatly and reached for the top file of the other stack, pulling it down and opening it, her chin resting on her hand as she focussed on the first paragraph.

* * *

><p>The walled town loomed out of the thickness of the mauve-grey twilight and Dean let out a soft exhale of relief, feeling the knots of tension in his shoulders and neck beginning to unwind as Sam drew up in front of the massive double gates.<p>

Despite the low-hanging clouds, the air was glass-sharp, biting into his lungs as he slid out of the cab, nodding to Rona and taking the padded flask. The gate keepers were now two pairs for either tower, a hunter and one of Tony's garrison, working together. There wouldn't be much of a division between the two jobs soon, he thought, licking the salt crystals from the ball of his thumb and forcing himself not to flinch at the ice-cold touch of the silver knife blade.

Climbing back into the warm cab, on the driver's side this time, he manoeuvred the susvee carefully through the streets and into the bailey, the clanking of the metal tracks echoing manically from the stone walls and thunderously in the enclosed shed.

"You taking a sled to get home?" Dean asked Sam as they climbed stiffly from the cab again, slamming the doors shut and crunching over the thick powder snow to the keep steps.

Sam nodded. "I'll come back in the morning, if you need me here for Jackson's meeting."

"Nah," Dean said, looking up at the towering grey walls. "Just an update."

He watched his brother turn away. "Sam."

"Yeah?" Sam turned back, his face barely visible in the folds of wool and fur that wrapped his head and neck.

"Congratulations, man," Dean said, one side of his mouth quirking up. "I really am glad you're happy."

Sam looked at him, hazel eyes crinkling up a little as he smiled back. "Me too. Took long enough." He hesitated and took a step toward his brother. "Tell her everything, Dean."

Looking away, Dean half-nodded and Sam recognised the compromise between agreement and doubt. He headed down the road that led out of the bailey and to the sheds holding the snowmobiles. He couldn't wait any longer to get home, to see Marla and Jean.

In front of the keep steps, Dean debated with himself on the question of going to see Bobby or going home. He scowled at the ground when he realised the reason behind his procrastination. Turning sharply away from the keep, he strode fast over the snow-covered ground toward the northern wall of the town, following the inner walls until he came to the tunnel that led to the enclosed bailey that held his home. He tried to pretend that the acceleration of his pulse was due to the cold, to the speed he was moving, to the problems that were rising up on every side of him. Tried to ignore the frisson of nervousness that sparked down his spine and back up his neck.

Slowing down as he came out of the enclosed tunnel, he looked around at the lit windows of the three occupied houses in the big square, bright against the deepening darkness. The snow hadn't been churned up here, crystallised powder crunching and squeaking under his boots, a smooth sheet of white broken only by the shadows thrown over it and the bare limbed trees that screened the homes from each other. If the walls hadn't enclosed the tiny neighbourhood, he could've been standing on any street, before the world had been broken and smashed, and his mouth curled up in a humourless smile, the realisation hitting him that he wouldn't be looking at a home of his own if that had been the case.

He stopped at the foot of the porch steps and looked up at the narrow glass panes to either side of the front door, both spilling a warm golden glow over the porch and the stairs. It looked … normal, he thought. Heart-breakingly normal.

The door opened as he stood there, and Alex stepped out, pulling the edges of her coat together as she looked down at him.

"Are you coming in?"

Dean climbed the steps slowly and stopped in front of her, feeling that disconcerting hesitation in himself as she didn't move, her face tilted up to him. Neither of them could quite make that first move, he thought, a memory of returning from some hunt or other, before, and the woman in front of him stepping close as he'd closed the door, her arms going around him without doubt or hesitation, overcoming his lifetime habit of waiting and watching for a welcome, every single time.

Alex bit her lip as she saw the uncertainty in his expression. She didn't know why he seemed to hold back, sometimes, didn't know if he was waiting for something from her or unsure in himself if this was what he wanted.

"Have you eaten?" she asked, breaking the tension between them and he shook his head, stepping back to let her through the door, following her into the warm hall and closing it behind him. He pulled off his thick coat and hung it in the narrow closet, dropping to one knee to unlace his boots and pull them off, watching her walk away from the corner of his eye.

Did she … _still_? It was a question that had no answer. She didn't, not the way she had, he knew. Didn't know him. Didn't remember what had been there before. She held a lot back, and he didn't know if it was because she didn't trust herself, or didn't trust him. Or if it was because she just didn't have the feelings that had once been there and had been strong enough to overcome her past.

Walking down the hall, he wondered if they would ever find what they'd had again. If they even could. It'd been a kind of a once-in-a-lifetime thing, for both of them.

His stomach growled at the scents that were filling the hall, and he tried to put his doubts aside, schooling his expression into something he hoped was positive as he came through the doorway.

James and Evelyn sat to either side of the long, scrubbed table, spreading their food over their faces and hands and dropping chunks onto the floor. He swallowed against the strange mixture of feelings the sight brought, walking around them to the counter that held the sink and picking up a clean, damp washcloth.

"I'll tackle the disaster area," Alex said, turning from the stove and handing him a plate. "Eat it while it's still hot."

Looking down at the plate and handing her the cloth, Dean wasn't sure if he wanted to be relieved of the duty. He'd come to the novel realisation over the last month that he didn't find the chores particularly onerous. Mostly, they brought back memories of taking care of Sam. Seen through an adult view, those memories were more good than bad, and even back then, he'd never found it taxing.

"Jo called. She said that you and Sam missed the shapeshifter?" Alex asked, and he sat down, nodding as he started to eat.

"Probably took off as soon as she made him," he said, tucking the hot food into his cheek and watching her clean off his son's face.

"Will it come here?"

He didn't think so. "I think it'll wait and see if it can get its kids. It went to a lot of trouble for them."

Grimacing inwardly as he heard those words come out, he kept his gaze fixed on his plate. The shifter had looked like him. He was pretty sure someone would've told Alex that while he'd been gone. He looked up as he heard her exhale.

"Do the women know?" she asked, her attention firmly fixed on Evelyn's mouth and cheeks.

"I don't know," he said. "Meredyth and Ray aren't sure of their reactions."

Her lips compressed a little and he wondered what she was thinking, wondered if he should say something about Jo … or Zoe's death or about … any of it. "What about you? Everything okay here?"

Nodding, she scooped up the last of the food in the bowl and fed Evelyn, keeping the spoon moving adroitly as she evaded the little girl's chubby hands. "Yeah, the freeze we got meant everyone just kept indoors, mostly. Oliver brought the files over and I've been going through them."

"Find anything?"

"A few things," she told him, lifting Evelyn from the chair. "I'm not sure how significant they are, but if I could through it with you later, that'd help."

"Sure."

"Keep an eye on James', I'll start the bath," she said, carrying Evelyn out of the room.

Shifting along the table closer to the little boy, Dean thought that she seemed both more relaxed than she'd been before he'd left and less. He finished the stew and picked up his bowl and James', carrying both to the sink. Turning back he lifted his son from the confines of the high chair.

'_Cause if it was me, it wouldn't seem much like protecting her, it would seem like you didn't trust her._

Sam's comment ran through his mind again as he climbed the staircase. He'd have to tell her, a shiver rippling through him with the thought. His brother was right. It'd been a mistake to try and pretend everything was fine when nothing had been.

She looked around as he came into the bathroom, on her knees, her arms covered to the elbow with a froth of small bubbles and Evelyn grinning gummily behind her.

"Oh, sorry, you didn't have to –"

Kneeling beside her, Dean lay James gently on the folded towel next to the bath and looked at her, one brow rising.

"What's going on?" he cut her off gently, his fingers finding and undoing the small buttons of the baby's clothing automatically.

"Nothing," Alex said, her gaze cutting back to the little girl in the tub. "I mean, I just – you just got back, you must be exhausted, I didn't want you to think –"

He slipped the soft suit from his son's wriggling body, taking off the diaper carefully and wiping him clean.

"This is the job, right?" Smiling crookedly at her, he picked James up and straightened, lowering him carefully into the warm, soapy water. "Twenty-four-seven for the rest of our lives?"

She ducked her head, a reluctant smile tucking in the corners of her mouth. "Well, not this exact part."

He shrugged, acknowledging the slight dig. "Looking after them, making sure they're alright," he amended, shaking his head. "Jeez, Alex, if Bobby can do the hard yards at sixty-eight, you don't think I can?"

She sighed. "I didn't know if you wanted to."

His brows drew together. He didn't think he'd given her the impression that he wanted to be elsewhere, doing something else. Most of the time, when he had the time to let his thoughts drift, this was exactly what he thought about, these simple domestic chores and the people right in front of him.

"I do. I want to be here, as much as I possibly can." Dragging in a deep breath, Dean forced another smile. His stomach was churning with the doubt he could see in her eyes. "C'mon, I'm trying to be a good father here."

"You _are_ a good father," she said immediately, her eyes meeting his, her certainty in that shaking him slightly.

"But you don't think I want to be here."

"I don't know why you're lying to me," she said bluntly.

"Can we, uh, get these guys to bed, and talk about it later?" he asked, looking down at James just in time to stop him from dowsing his face with the soapy washcloth.

"Sure."

* * *

><p>"Sit down," he said, gesturing to the other end of the sofa.<p>

When she was curled up against the far arm, he said, "I didn't lie to you, Alex. I just didn't tell you everything."

She didn't say anything, just watched him, legs drawn up and arms wrapped around them.

"Jerome got a message from the French. The alpha vampire attacked Marc and his group and killed one of them, but left Marc and Christophe alive. It gave Marc a message – for me," he continued, his gaze sliding sideways to the bottle sitting on the table. Forcing his attention away from it, he looked back at her. He didn't want to take the edge off his tension this time. "The alpha said that the Grigori are still looking for you, as well as the tablets. Francesca says it's because they think you're the last scion from Christ's bloodlines, the one who can reveal the angel tablet."

He searched her face for a reaction, for a sign that he'd just scared the hell out of her. She didn't respond, but her gaze had dropped, and he swallowed nervously.

"I didn't want you to worry about what might happen, that, uh," he paused, looking for the least ominous way to say it. "That what happened might happen again."

Alex nodded slowly. "_Could_ it happen again? Could they come in here?"

"No," Dean said, the word coming out automatically, knowing that it wasn't entirely the truth either. "No, I'm not going anywhere until we get this figured out and I can end it."

She was silent for a long time, looking down at her knees, and he glanced again at the bottle on the table, wanting to know what was going through her mind, afraid to ask, needing something to help him get through this because he didn't think he could do it on his own. He'd made that promise before and broken it.

"You don't trust me, do you?" she asked him finally, looking up. "I mean, you said it would be enough, between us, even if I never remembered any more than I have, but you don't feel that now."

His mouth twisted up as he looked away. "That's not –"

"Please … don't. Could you just tell me the truth?" she cut him off, the raw plea in her voice cutting through him. Turning away, he reached out for the bottle and glass, fingers clenching on the bottle as he saw them shaking.

It wasn't going to be enough, he thought, pouring out the whiskey until the glass was nearly full. Not enough to say that it had nothing with trust, that it had to do with what had happened and what he'd done over those months. He'd never faced what he'd felt, the days and weeks and months after they'd burned what he'd thought was her body. At first, he'd bottled it up because he had a job to do. Later … later he'd kept those feelings buried because he was scared of the damage they'd do. They came out, sometimes, in his dreams, but some internal defence system had limited them, had walled them in.

"Last year, before you were taken …" he started, his voice unsteady. "… we – I had – I had everything I wanted."

Picking up the glass and swallowing half the contents in a mouthful, he couldn't meet her eyes. Saying it out loud, thinking about it again, all the emotion that he'd locked away was spilling out. He drew in a breath as the warmth of the alcohol settled in his stomach. The words were hard to find, hard to get out, hard to admit to.

"I was …" he said, his voice dropping a little when his chest tightened. "I was scared to hell of what being a father was going to mean, but I – I kind of figured that between us, we could do … we'd be good at it, together."

He put the glass back on the table. For a while, he'd felt whole. No nightmares, no twisting pain, just whole and himself. "I felt – I, uh, it felt – like I'd found a place where I – where I could be … just me, no excuses, no lies, just –"

It'd been a revelation, that feeling. A benediction he'd had no idea he'd needed, and had never once looked for. It'd made him think of the times in his life that had come closest but had still never made it.

"I've never had that, not once, not even with Dad and Sam," he said, admitting it out loud, admitting it to himself. "We were close, I trusted them with my life, knew that they trusted me with theirs, but …"

But he'd always had to be strong. Stronger. Weight pressed him down, the weight of a lifetime of responsibility, to be there, to protect. To save.

Hunting. His family. His friends. Those memories had been what he'd looked back on for reassurance, for grounding, yet as close as they'd been, all of them, sometimes, he still hadn't been able to shed the feeling that if they knew, knew how he'd felt, down where he lived, down where he breathed, he'd lose them, lose the family he'd needed more than he'd needed anything else. "I couldn't tell them – I couldn't admit – I couldn't let them see how things felt … and it – with you, that wasn't there. All that weight, it just vanished. And when I figured that out – I never wanted to lose it."

He risked a glance at her, relief filling him when he saw the understanding in her face. It was impossible for him to clarify it further, to explain in just words what it'd felt like to see someone looking back at him who'd just wanted _him_. As he was.

The walls that surrounded the memories had thinned and Dean picked up the glass again, finishing the contents as he looked for the words to explain, to make it clear.

"Then I watched you die," he said slowly, eyes closing as the memory of kneeling there again, feeling, listening for a heartbeat that didn't come, seeped out and through him. He'd known that if he let in the pain, if he'd accepted it, he would've stopped moving, stopped fighting, stopped everything. "It felt like I died too, a part of me did, on those tracks. That part that didn't have to –"

He sucked in a breath and shook his head, trying to shake loose the memory. "I can't bury that memory," he told her. "I can't _not-see_ it, the way it happened, and it doesn't _help_ to know it wasn't you, it wasn't real because that was my worst nightmare and it happened in front of my eyes." He tipped his head back, his chest unbearably tight, dragging in another deep breath as he struggled to keep those feelings under some kind of control. "Everything I thought I'd had –" he said, his voice thick. "That was gone."

Alex watched him as he fought back the memories and emotions. He didn't show what he was feeling, most of the time. His account of what had happened, the day they'd met the Grigori in Iowa, had been less than a sketch of those events, she realised, a dry rendering that hadn't even hinted at what he'd felt, or thought, or had had to find a way through.

Dean leaned forward, rubbing his hands over his face hard and pouring another triple from the bottle. When he'd downed it, he put the glass down, his gaze flicking to her and away again.

"Maybe that'll go, with enough time, I don't know, but it's not that I don't trust you or the way you feel or that this won't be enough, it's that it – it takes everything I've got to stop myself from thinking it's going to happen again, and most of the time … I can't even do that."

"If I got the memories back –" Alex started to say, and Dean's head snapped around as he leaned forward, his hands involuntarily curling into fists.

"Alex, no," he cut her off sharply. "If they came back in a single hit, Meredyth said there's a chance you might not be able to deal with it all." His voice had deepened with the rush of fear that flashed through him, a white heat from head to foot. He'd taken the doc's words seriously, and he wasn't going to let her risk what they still had. "What the order's worked out from the documents on that machine, what you went through – there's probably a real good reason you can't remember it, and trying to push it might make everything a lot worse."

"I don't care!"

He couldn't help the small flinch back at the pain in her voice, or the surge of anger that followed it. "I do! Fuck, I didn't – I couldn't – I didn't even acknowledge that you were gone for weeks after – I couldn't! Don't make me go through that again!"

She stared at him helplessly. "I don't _want_ to be here, trying to imagine – trying to – to – to catch up on a life that – that we both know was better." Unfolding herself from the corner, she hunched over the edge of the sofa, her voice shaking. "I don't _know_ you well enough to know what you're thinking, what you're feeling, if you want me or you just want that other woman, the one who knew you, the one you felt you belonged with."

"Stop, okay? Alex, please," he said, shifting close to her, his hands sliding up her arms to grip her shoulders. "Just stop."

She stilled under his touch and he swallowed against the flutter in his stomach, his arm sliding around her shoulders. He lifted his hand to turn her face to him.

"You _are_ that woman, okay?" he told her, tilting his head to see her face. "I know it doesn't feel like that, I know I – talking about this stuff? Not one of the things I'm real good at. But you are. It's just going to take some time, for both of us." Her eyes were wide and afraid, he saw with an inward wince, hoping his didn't have that same fear reflected in them. "It doesn't matter how hard it is, or how hard it gets, this," he said, gesturing vaguely around the room. "This _is_ what I want. You and James and Evelyn, and this – this life we're trying to figure out."

She closed her eyes and he saw her tears spill out and down her cheeks as she tipped forward into him, her arms sliding up around his neck. Holding her closer as he felt a shudder through her frame, he wasn't entirely sure she believed him. Not all the way, not yet. He hoped she was trying to.

* * *

><p><em><strong>January 23, 2014. Litteris Hominae, Kansas<strong>_

Under the warm glow of the overhead lights and the lamps that were scattered around the room, the faces of the people sitting around the long, polished tables seemed younger, Sam thought, rubbing the back of his neck tiredly. And not as exhausted as he knew they were.

"We can't get any further without an angel's help," Katherine said, looking at Dean.

"He's not answering," Dean said with a shrug. "It's all in Enochian?"

"Linguistically," Jasper interjected, "Enochian isn't such a difficult language and we have a key of sorts, but there are parts of what he's written that veer from the classic form that I can decipher and parts that seem to be a more archaic version."

Sam watched his brother lean back in the chair, eyes hooded as he considered the situation.

"And there's the matter of establishing if Zephon is the teacher of the rebels, and if he could be the angel they're looking for," Jerome added, reading through the bundle of notes in front of him. "We need to get word to Michael."

Sam saw Adam flinch back slightly, saw Dean's head turn a little as well, catching the movement peripherally, and he saw his brother's expression twitch a little, as if at a thought or memory.

"Alright, well, if Cas ain't answering, he ain't answering" Bobby said, looking from the legacy to the hunter. "Nothin' we can do about contacting Heaven right now. We get an update on what's happening in Russia?"

Jerome sighed and nodded. "Kelly's reached Arkhangelsk, Marc's last report was that they were less a hundred miles from the remains of the city." He pushed his glasses up his nose and pulled out a sheet of paper from beneath the stack in front of him. "The sea ice is frozen, they should be able to make the crossing soon."

"Nothing from the Irin?" Sam asked.

"No." Jerome shook his head. "If Amaros and Sariel escaped, we may not hear anything."

"And if they didn't, the first we'll know of it is that dick heading here for the last tablet," Dean said, straightening up in his chair and leaning on the table. "We can stop angels from getting in here, but Chuck still hasn't found anything except vague shit on the cambion and we haven't found the mirror or more of the node-stones to be able to protect the whole place."

"That's something else we need the damned angel for," Bobby said, flicking a look at him.

"The leys maps are all here," Jerome said, lifting a brow at Bobby. "If you've got the time and some willing labour, you could go prospecting?"

"Yeah, well, it might come to that," Bobby retorted sourly.

"Alex, I want you and Katherine both working on the Vatican documents now," Jerome said, turning to look at her. "Francesca has sent more through and with the other searches we're doing, we're running out of fresh eyes."

She looked slightly alarmed, Sam thought, watching her gaze slip uncertainly to the man beside her.

"Do you need me here?" she asked Jerome, looking back at him.

"Not immediately," Jerome said. "I'll send Frances around with what we've got so far."

She nodded, and Sam wondered at the diffidence in her now. When they'd worked together on deciphering Chuck's endless reams of handwritten notes about the tablet, she'd been very different, organised, incisive, used to the demands that she'd been placed under, unafraid to speak her mind. Now, she seemed almost lost. The work she'd done of tracking through the angelologies had been very good, but with people … he wondered if she'd been more like that before the virus. For some, the utter destruction of the world as it'd been had been a liberation of sorts, a chance to be more than they ever could've been.

"What do we do about Cas?" he murmured to his brother as the meeting broke up.

Dean looked over at Adam. "Nothing we can do about Cas, but he told me once that there was an open communication line between an angel and his vessel," he said, lifting one brow slightly, his expression speculative as he looked at their half-brother.

Sam's brow creased up as he followed Dean's gaze. "You think Adam can talk to Michael?"

"I think Michael might hear him," he said, getting up. "And he might do something about it."

He paused beside Alex's chair, hand curling around her shoulder as he leaned close to her. "Gotta talk to Adam, I won't be long."

Sam watched her nod, saw her rest her cheek against his brother's hand for a second and then straighten up.

Following Dean across the room, he asked, "What's going on with Alex?"

Dean glanced back at him. "Nothing, she – uh – I'll explain later."

* * *

><p>They caught up with Adam as he was leaving the library, heading down the hall to his office. He turned when he heard them behind him, stopping and waiting, his expression wary as he looked from one to the other.<p>

"We need to talk about Michael," Dean said, looking at the door of Adam's office.

"What about him?" Adam asked warily, not moving.

Dean looked at him for a moment. "Cas told me that there's an open line between an angel and his vessel, and we need to get a message to Michael."

Adam was shaking his head before he'd finished. "Dean, I can't –"

"I'm sorry, Adam, but I'm not asking."

The youngest Winchester looked at the unyielding determination in the faces of both his brothers and turned for the office, the limp barely noticeable now as he opened the door and walked inside. "What do you want me to do?"

Coming in behind them, Sam walked to the desk and leaned against the edge, shrugging. "Pray."

* * *

><p>How long would it take for the archangel to respond, Dean wondered, dropping into the armchair by the fire and looking around the library. Alex was at the table, looking at a pile of books with Katherine beside her. She was still leery of being in a large group of people and he hadn't understood it until she told him of the disorientation of being surrounded by faces who looked at her with familiarity, with expectation. She didn't remember the people here, but they remembered her, and it showed in the way they would approach her, begin to talk to her, touch her lightly without thinking of it, each exerting an unintended pressure that she remember them, that she pick up where she'd apparently left off.<p>

He thought Rufus and Chuck had been the most disappointed. Chuck had tried to reconnect for a while, until Alex had withdrawn. Rufus had seen her uneasiness almost immediately and had backed off himself.

"She seems more comfortable here."

He turned to see Father Emilio sit down in the chair opposite, the Jesuit's gaze on Alex and Katherine as well.

Lifting a shoulder in a slight shrug, Dean answered, "So long as she's not crowded."

The priest nodded, turning to look at him. "It was a good idea to get her to work on the files. No one had checked the histories that far back."

"Do you think there'll be anything to find in those?" Dean glanced back toward the table. "Father McConnaughey seemed convinced that we won't be able to check whatever descendants there might've been."

Father Emilio folded his hands, one over the other, resting his chin on them. "I think he's right about that. But she had a talent for seeing past the words and to the intent, with Chuck's transcriptions. For understanding the connections. It might be that she can find some common thread we have missed, find it through disconnected texts and follow it."

The side of the hunter's mouth curled up. "Big ask."

"All we do around here," the priest acknowledged with an answering smile. "While you were gone, she mentioned she wanted to see the machine, in Utah," he added, the smile fading.

Dean looked down. He hadn't realised she'd talked to anyone else about it. "Meredyth said it was a risk," he told the priest. "A big one."

"She was adamant," Father Emilio said. "I had the impression her need had something to do with you."

Exhaling softly, Dean nodded. "I didn't tell her about the alpha's message."

The priest leaned back in the chair, hands clasped together and looked at him for a long moment. "It is, perhaps, an unfortunate happenstance of my calling that I sometimes feel compelled to give advice, even if unsought," he said quietly to the man opposite. "In your case, I am reminded of the words of Buddha, and his quiet wisdom for every time and circumstance - _it is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours. It cannot be taken from you, not by angels or by demons, heaven or hell_."

Dean looked back at him, brows drawing together.

"When you are willing to live, as well as die, for those you love, Dean, perhaps you will heal and she will be able to as well," Father Emilio elaborated no less cryptically, rising from the chair and moving away before he could come up with a response.

* * *

><p><em><strong>January 24, 2014. East Keep, Kansas<strong>_

Opening his eyes, Dean looked around the shadowy bedroom for a long moment, aware that Alex wasn't there, and that he couldn't hear anything in the house either. The curtains were drawn, and he turned his head to look at the clock beside the bed, one brow lifting as he saw it was past eight. Long past their usual rising time, James generally saw to that.

He sat up, rubbing a hand along his jaw. He'd slept deeply, unusually so, and he felt good, if a little disoriented by the disruption to what had become a routine in his days. Pushing the covers aside, he felt around the floor with his toes, leaning over to the snag the jeans as they touched the denim, pulling them on automatically and standing.

Had she taken them out this morning? He couldn't remember a conversation the previous evening about it. He walked out of the bedroom and down the hall to the bath, glancing into the open doors of the children's room as he passed it. The cots were empty, but the room looked as it usually did, untidy still with the bustle of getting them up and downstairs for their breakfast. Why hadn't she woken him to help, he wondered?

He zipped up, unconsciously straining to hear anything other than the small sounds he was making and turned to the sink, filling his hands with cold water and dousing his face in it, the ultra-cold a bracing slap that cleared the last of the leftover sleep from his mind. He looked into the mirror briefly as he brushed his teeth, ignoring the thought that snuck in, reminding him he was a year older today.

In the hall and on the stairs, the house remained silent, his footsteps thudding softly on the rugs that were scattered over the hardwood floors, the air still warm with the basement furnace's efforts. The front door was still locked, he checked as he turned around the newel post and headed for the kitchen, the trap carved in front of it undisturbed.

He could smell coffee as he walked along the narrower hall to the back of the house, and a flutter of relief tingled along his nerves, a solid sign that he hadn't been abandoned in the middle of the night. The aromatic scent was another part of the familiar and reassuring routine they'd established here, and he sped up a little, lengthening his stride to get some caffeine before he tried to figure out what else might be going on.

Turning from the hall in through the kitchen door, the first thing he saw was the massive cake, sitting in the middle of the kitchen table. Then his heart jumped into his throat and he stumbled sideways, clutching at the door-frame as Sam, Marla, Adam, Frances and Alex jack-in-the-boxed out of their hiding places to either side of the door.

"Surprise!"

Swallowing the long string of explosive expletives that had instantly filled his throat, Dean stood for a second, head down and eyes closed, feeling his pulse hammering against the base of his throat. He sucked in a deep chestful of air and waited for said pulse to settle back down to something that wasn't going to precipitate a fatal coronary. Lifting his head, he looked at his brother.

"Your idea?"

"Uh, no," Sam said, a grin deepening the dimples as his gaze flicked past his brother to Alex. "You can thank Alex for this."

Turning to look at her, he saw her mouth tuck in at the corners as she walked to him and slipped her arms around him.

"I'm sorry, Sam said you loved surprises," she said, her expression somewhat contrite as she looked up at him. "Happy Birthday."

"Huh." He shot his brother a look promising payback over her head, then bent his head to kiss her, the combination of the almost-heart attack and the warmth of her body pressing against him producing an unexpected and, given the number of people surrounding them, ill-timed heat.

"Next year, can we do this without the crowd?" he murmured against her ear.

He felt her nod, the slight lift of her cheek against his and stepped back a little, his gaze returning to Sam.

"Don't think you're getting away with this, that's so not going to happen."

* * *

><p><em>Surreal<em>, he thought, sitting at the dining table four hours later, looking at his brothers to either side of him, the table filled with more kids than adults, but every face there alight and relaxed. Sam was talking to Frances about the wedding, Adam's head was bent over his daughter, and Dean saw that the wariness that had characterised a lot of Adam's expressions had gone as he looked up at Alex and smiled.

_Surreal_. He couldn't get past the feeling that he was dreaming, that this scene, this – this – this normal, much-wanted, so matter-of-fact scene could be happening, that he could be a part of it.

_But when you need them, need them to fight, they'll fight for this, for the memory of it and the feel of it and the need for it._

He looked at Alex, turning from Adam and leaning across the table to dish out roast vegetables to Marla and Jean. She'd said that to him, the second year in Michigan, at Christmas in Tawas.

He'd fight for this, he thought, a little dazedly. To have this be his life. A home, with his family, the people he loved together, the conversation not exactly normal, not exactly ordinary, but not filled with fear and tension and pain either.

"Rufus called in last night," Sam said, turning around and looking at him and Dean blinked, dragging his attention back to here and now. "Said he'd been down as far Baton Rouge, no sign of the alpha vamp."

Nodding, he took the bowl of mashed potato Adam was holding out to him automatically, setting it down next to his plate and scooping a couple of spoonfuls out.

"It was a long shot, after Marc's call," he said, passing the bowl on to Sam. "That he'd be back in the country so quick."

"What do you want to do about Metatron?" Adam asked him curiously. "Do we chase him?"

Dean's mouth curled up derisively. "On our magic carpets?" He shook his head. "He's long gone too."

"You think he went to meet Camael?"

"He thought he had the location of the angel tablet, didn't he?" Dean's gaze went to Alex, sitting at the other end of the table and feeding Evelyn. He looked down at his plate. "From Davis' notes?"

"Yeah, that's what Felix gave him," Sam confirmed.

"Then I guess so," he said, stabbing his fork through a piece of meat, potato and something orange. "Did we get any further on the copies of his books?"

"A bit," Alex said, wiping her daughter's face and looking at him. "The anomalies Jasper kept finding weren't anomalies, they were references to a single word, repeated through the texts."

"What word?"

"Sentinel," Adam said, glancing from Alex to Dean. "Looks like he was writing about the prophecies."

"What's the story?"

"We haven't gotten that far yet," Adam said with a small shrug. "We're tracking through the books now, looking for the matches, but there're still a lot of words we need an angel's help with."

* * *

><p><em><strong>Later<strong>_

"So, whose idea was the surprise party?" Dean asked Alex as he pushed the covers aside and stretched out on the bed.

"Sam told me you loved surprises," Alex said apologetically, picking up his clothes from the floor and tossing them over the chair by the window. "You did look surprised."

He snorted. "That wasn't surprise," he said, his lip curling up. "That's what I look like when I'm having a heart-attack."

He heard her soft laugh as she sat on the edge of the bed with her back to him, and reached across to pull her down beside him. "It wasn't funny."

"No," she agreed, looking up at him. "No more surprise parties."

"What the hell made you think of a birthday party anyway?" he asked, leaning on his elbow.

She shrugged slightly. "I wanted to see you smile."

One brow rising, he asked, "By trying to kill me? Jeez, there's a whole list of things you could've done –"

"Not that kind of – I thought that with your brothers, and just family here, you might relax enough to be happy for a moment," she told him, her tone dry. Underneath, he heard something else, something wistful.

Looking down at her, memories of the last few months filled him and he realised that he hadn't felt as relaxed as he had tonight for a long time. Since the harvest last year, in fact. Back when all he'd had to worry about was getting in enough food to see them through the winter. He'd been happy but not relaxed, just before she'd been taken.

"It was good," he admitted softly, lifting his hand and brushing back an errant curl from her brow as he leaned closer. "They could come through the front door next time."

* * *

><p>Sensation, lingering in his nerves, filling him with warmth, bled slowly from his body and Dean pulled in a deep, long breath, heavy and sated, and at the same time, light and empty. He smiled in the darkness as he heard a soft whisper of breath beside him, felt a long thigh slide over his, his arm drawing her closer, feathery curls brushing over his shoulder.<p>

_Keep this_, he thought drowsily. _Keep this day and hold it close_.

_It is better to conquer yourself_ … the Jesuit's words drifted in on the heels of the thought and he frowned, sensing a rebuke in those words although he couldn't figure out why. _When you are willing to live for those you love, as well as die_ … he didn't know what that meant either. He was here, alive. He'd kept on fighting. What more was he supposed to do?

* * *

><p><em><strong>January 26, 2014.<strong>_

"Where the hell have you been?" Dean growled at the angel as he walked through the keep gates and sank into knee-deep powder beside the raised road.

"Michael sent me," Cas said, avoiding the question completely, Dean noticed. "Camael has recovered two of the tablets."

So, one of the _Irin_ at least, had been found, Dean thought, looking at the drawn expression on the angel's face.

"Which ones?"

"Leviathan and Behemoth. The tablets under the protection of Amaros," Cas told him.

That left the angel tablet, whereabouts unknown, the monster tablet, under the Arctic sea and hopefully soon to be in Kelly's hands, and the demon tablet, guarded and warded in the order.

"Did you find out anything about the other prophecies?" he asked bluntly, pulling the collar of his coat as a trickle of icy wind found its way down his neck.

For a long moment Cas was silent, then he shook his head. "Nothing new. It appears that the conspiracy was formed much earlier than we'd imagined, however."

Looking at him sourly, Dean nodded. "That's what we figured too, without your help," he said, gesturing to the keep. "We got copies of Metatron's books. The dick disappeared with what he thinks is the location for the angel tablet. And it might be one of the higher level angels at the sharp end of all this."

Cas blinked at him. "Metatron was here?"

Dean sighed. "Long story," he said. "And it's freezing out here."

The angel looked up at the wards to either side of the gate. "I cannot enter this place now, Dean."

"Then zap us someplace warm, so I can fill you in," Dean said abruptly, knowing he was going to regret the request.

The angel stepped forward and reached out, his fingertips cold against Dean's forehead.

* * *

><p><em><strong>Hiva 'Oa, Marquesa Islands, South Pacific<strong>_

Dean blinked as the balmy air, thickly filled with the smell of the sea, sun-warmed sand, and the heavy vegetation, wrapped around him. His layers of coats and shirts were stifling and he pulled off the top two, dumping them on the fine, white sand at his feet.

"Better?" Cas enquired tartly.

Looking around, Dean wondered if the angel might consider family trips, sometime in the future. He could stand spending a few weeks here with Alex and James and Evelyn.

"Metatron, Dean?"

"Uh, yeah," he said, pulling his gaze back from the endless stretch of quiet, gold-tinted ocean in front of him and the almost overwhelming desire to pull off his boots and feel it on his feet, and looking at the angel. "He turned up, a few weeks ago. Said he had information for the order, but it looks like it was more of a fishing expedition. He was carrying a load of books, handwritten, mostly in Enochian."

"And you have copies?" Cas asked, as Dean dropped to the sand, stretching out and leaning back on his elbows.

"We're working through them slowly, but yeah, it'd be quicker if you could read them and give us the high points."

"What makes you think they're about the prophecies?" Cas looked down at the beach and lowered himself gingerly.

"Sentinel's the word that appears consistently through what Jerome, Alex and Katherine have been able to decipher," Dean told him bluntly. "We need information, man. A lot of it. The Grigori are still after Alex, think she's the last scion and the one who can open the buried city."

"That – that's –" Cas said uncertainly and Dean frowned as he watched the angel.

"What?"

"It seems likely that there is some substance to the prophecy of both the last scion and the Sentinel," Cas said slowly. "Not as they were depicted in the Grigori's manifest, however."

Dean waited, breathing in and out, as deeply as he could.

"The Sentinel is … real, Dean."

"Real – how? What the hell does that mean, Cas?"

The angel shook his head. "In the library, there were texts, more than one. I – we – believe that Metatron altered at least one of them. God's plan, to have a … a watcher, a guardian, over the planes, whether they were open or closed, that is written down in the oldest of our histories. But it was hidden, after Lucifer fell."

"Why?"

"Because our Father left, not long after that. And all our prayers and our calls didn't bring him back. All of your – humanity's – prayers didn't either."

"So, what? Some angel decided to pretend that the plan was bogus and started stirring up a train of events to make him come back?" Dean asked, sitting up abruptly and rubbing a hand over his jaw as he looked at the angel. "What made them think that'd work?"

"It seems that Metatron knew, even before he finished his work, that God was planning on leaving everything – all of us – to, uh, work it out for ourselves," Cas said slowly. "He altered the texts to divert attention from the Sentinel and when he discovered that there were, in fact, descendants from the Son's human line, he added those in to make it harder to find out the truth."

"But – wait a minute – there had to have been others, who knew," Dean said, shaking his head. "I mean, knew that God was taking off and not coming back, or at least knew that the descendant thing wasn't a part of the original plan."

"I believe there was."

"Alex said she found an angel," Dean said, looking at him carefully. "Some kind of different Sphere angel, taught Lucifer and Metatron."

Castiel nodded. "Zephon. Yes."

"Michael done anything about him?"

"Not yet," Cas hedged. "The situation isn't that straightforward."

"What? Why the hell not?"

"He's disappeared," the angel admitted.

"Great!" Dean turned away from him in frustration. "Disappeared – from Heaven? We can look forward to more fucking angels down here?"

"That is uncertain. We have been unable to locate his – signature – on any of the planes."

"Sonofa–" Dean cut himself off and stared at the sea. "What are the prophecies for the last scion and the Sentinel?"

"The last scion can find the tablets, can feel them," Cas said. "The Sentinel is the mortal who can activate them."

"We knew that!" Dean looked at him in frustration. "How do we find them?"

"I don't know. Whatever detail there was in our documents is what has been altered, Dean."

"Alright, take us home," Dean decided abruptly, bending to retrieve the clothing he'd shed. "Right now, you have to look at these books."

The angel nodded unhappily, stepping close to the hunter and reaching out.

* * *

><p><em><strong>Ghost Valley Farm, Kansas<strong>_

The fort at the edge of the fields was solidly enclosed and a fire burned in the narrow hearth but it was still icy cold and Dean paced impatiently around the large, square room, as much to keep his blood circulating as to keep his frustration under control.

"Well?"

Castiel looked up from the table, shaking his head. "These are Metatron's writings, the full transcriptions of both the prophecies and his plans for bringing about the Apocalypse."

"Good, okay, get to the part about finding the people and the tablets."

The angel looked at him dryly, gesturing at the reams of paper Mitch and Deirdre had printed out. "This is not the work of a few minutes, Dean."

On the other side of the table, Katherine sat, wrapped from ankle to jaw in a thick, plaid blanket. "Can you give us the key to the language?"

Cas shook his head. "This is written in a mixture of the High formal and archaic proclamation – the old way the Spheres used to speak to one another – tenses. An angel can read it, but I could not educate a human scholar in the language sufficiently in the time you have to enable you to do the same."

Dean's face screwed up. "How long?"

"Even I need help with this, Dean," Cas told him. "If I can take these back to Heaven, I will have that help."

Katherine glanced at the hunter. "They're copies, we can keep muddling through on our own while we're waiting." She turned to the angel. "We too could use the help of the angels with some of the languages and texts we have."

"I will see what I can do."

"Alright." Dean scowled at the floor. He didn't want any delays on this. "It's top priority, right, Cas?"

The angel nodded. "For us as much as you," he agreed. The air sighed with the rustle of wings when he vanished, the papers gone as well.

"Why would the Grigori be so certain that Alex is the last scion?" Katherine asked Dean, getting up from the table and pulling the plaid closer about her shoulders.

He shook his head. "I don't know. Cas said there wasn't a way to tell, not physically."

"You know," she said as she followed him out of the fort and back to the susvee. "She's not the last now anyway."

He stopped with his hand on the vehicle's door, staring at her. The scholar's percipience sent a shiver through him. She was right about that.

* * *

><p><em><strong>January 27, 2014. Novaya Zemlya, Barents Sea<strong>_

"Ah, Kelly?" Jack said, looking at the ticking meter in his hand. "We're getting some pretty strong readings."

Kelly turned around and nodded. "Yeah, island was a test site from 1957," he said casually. "Be thankful it's all frozen."

Marc glanced at Christophe, shrugging at the younger man's shocked expression. They'd reached the Americans the day before, had a few hours rest and had started across the frozen Barents Sea early in the morning.

"What?" Danielle said, pushing the furs down in front of her mouth as she looked around the frozen sea. "What happened here?"

"Russians used the island as a nuclear test site and waste dump," Kelly told her shortly. He lifted his binoculars, adjusting the focus slightly. "There it is."

"A nuclear waste dump," Lee repeated. "And we're walking into it?"

"You can stay here if you want," Kelly said, glancing at him. "But that tablet is under that," he added, pointing to the dark lump to one side of the islands craggy cliffline. "And we don't have much time to get it."

Lee and Danielle looked at each other silently. "How much danger are we in, if we go inside?"

"Less than out here," Kelly said shortly. "Make up your minds."

"That's a sub," Jack commented as they got closer. "It won't be in that?"

"No, there's another ship, under it."

The sea ice was hummocked and scoured, drifts of snow deceptively deep and sometimes hidden completely by the pale shadows. Ahead, the turret of the decommissioned submarine protruded several feet from the surrounding ice, blackened and ugly.

"The sub interior is shielded from its own reactor," Kelly told them as they climbed down inside. "Once we get through the end, we'll be exposed for a few minutes, then shielded again by the rock holding the older wreck. Like I said, you can come or stay, but make up your minds now."

"I'll come," Marc said, resettling his pack more securely on his back.

Christophe nodded reluctantly and Jack, Lee and Danielle looked at each other.

"I'll go," Jack said after a moment. Danielle shook her head.

"I'm staying," she said, and Lee nodded agreement a moment later.

"I'll stay with her."

"Alright," Kelly said. "No comms down here, between the radioactivity and the iron and rock. I think it'll take us between one and three hours to find the tablet and retrieve it, if the cave's still there."

Marc looked at him curiously. "You know this place?"

"Had to do a recce before the world went belly-up," Kelly told him with a casual shrug. He glanced at Danielle and Lee, his face creasing up in a hard smile. "Spent four hours crawling through this mess when it was hotter than it is now, still here."

Danielle looked at him sourly. "Goody for you."

"Yeah," Kelly laughed. "Listen, hanging around here, there's no point to it. Get back to the mainland, see if you can rig up something to get a signal back home."

Lee frowned. "Leave you here?"

"Well, you ain't coming in and there isn't any help you can give us from up here," Kelly pointed out. "By the time we get back to you, a base camp'll be looking pretty good." He scratched his beard. "And get the reindeer back, we'll go faster with them."

"Alright." Danielle looked from him to Jack. "Don't do anything stupid."

Kelly watched as she tightened her pack and turned back to the ladder, climbing back up to the surface again, Lee on her heels. When the pressure lid clanged back into place, he turned to Marc.

"We'll need to crawl through the torpedo tubes."

The French hunter nodded. "Leave our equipment here."

"Not going to get through them with it," Kelly confirmed dryly. "Whatever you can get into pockets, take. Once we're through, it'll be a long way back."

Ducking to get through the low, narrow pressure hatches, Kelly plumbed his memories for the route through the sub's empty tubes and into the hull of the ship that the sub had crashed into. Last time, he'd had a simple scuba setup, a small bottle that he could hold in one hand. The sea was frozen deep, he could hear the pops and crackles of the ice against the metal submarine, and he hoped the semi-solid plastic tube he'd come down here to install would still be in place, and intact against the expansion of the frozen water.

Beyond the ship's bow, wedged into an underwater cave on the side of the island, he remembered the caves, miles of them, twisting through the bedrock. He didn't know why they weren't filled with water, some freak of vacuum or pressure within the island's structure, but he did know that deep under the rock, there was a round cavern, smooth and polished as if it had made by man, instead of nature, and warmed by the thermal vents that ran under the island and twisted and turned under the sea to Iceland. The cave hadn't been his objective, back then, it'd been an interesting side-trip only. A good place to rest up before moving on. He'd seen the pile of stone and clay tablets and had looked at a few, curious but unenlightened since he hadn't been able to read the tight, spidery cuneiform writing. They should try and take back as many as possible, he thought, the flashlight beam picking up the tube hatches ahead.

"This is it," he said, lowering the flashlight and looking back over his shoulder. "No one's claustrophobic, right?"

"Bit late for that, isn't it?" Jack said sourly as he stood, hunched over in the narrow corridor.

Kelly grinned at him. "Keep at least half a length apart, I might need to go slow if there're any obstacles in there." He turned away from them and opened the hatch, wriggling himself into the long, narrow tube and using his elbows and toes to move forward. There was some corrosion, not as much as he'd feared, on the surface of the tube. Ahead, he could hear more grinding, popping and creaking. At the end of the tube, the bolted-on flange of the plastic sleeve shone back a bright orange in the beam of the flashlight and his mouth lifted up at one side in pleased surprise. He turned his head slightly.

"Alright back there?"

The murmuring assent from behind him echoed slightly in the metal tube. "Got a plastic sleeve to get through, then we're in the ship. Don't make any sudden movements and try and keep your weight evenly balanced."

He took the silence that followed as agreement, stretching out his arms in front of him to pull himself into the sleeve. For a moment, it shivered a little, flexing under his weight, then it stilled and he left out his breath. No room for a quick retreat here, if the water'd decided to pour in. He was glad that it wasn't. At the other end of the sleeve, the ship's air supply came from the caves.

He glanced at his watch fifteen minutes later, as he swung his legs free of the sleeve and set them onto the steel floor. Not bad, all things considered, he decided, clearing the opening and extending a hand to Jack as he wriggled out.

* * *

><p><em><strong>January 28, 2014. Litteris Hominae, Kansas<strong>_

Dean paced along the office wall, veering around the furniture without looking. "So what you're saying is we've run out of options for verifying any of this crap?"

Bobby glanced at Jerome and shrugged. "Yeah, I guess that's what we're sayin'," he agreed reluctantly.

Stopping, Dean stared at the wall. "Fine. We don't waste any more time on this," he said bluntly, turning to look at his brother. "Any of that stuff come close to Chuck's last vision?"

Jerome shook his head. "There may be more in the books of Metatron –"

"Or maybe not," Dean cut him off. "Forget it, doesn't matter, that last one was on the high-flown side anyway."

"Chuck's still working on the tablet –"

Rufus' head snapped around as the door to the small closet in the corner of the office slammed open and a young man stumbled out, blood spatters down one side of the tailored suit jacket he wore, bruises purpling his cheek and his eyes flicking fast from face to face in the room.

"Where is John Winchester?"

"What the –" Dean stared at him. "Who the fuck are you?"

"No time," the man said, barely glancing at him, his gaze swinging wildly and settling on Jerome. "I'm looking for – are you a legacy?"

Jerome nodded slowly. "Jerome Ackers –"

"Jerome …? Your father was David?" The man swayed in place, his eyes fluttering shut briefly. "Thank God! Where is John? He must be here."

Sam looked at Dean, seeing his brother's face fill with a stony fury. "He's not. Who are you?"

"And how the hell'd you get in here?" Dean ground out, taking a step toward him.

The building shuddered and a burst of light, nacreous and throbbing, came from the open door of the closet. The man spun around, backing away from the open door.

"Oh … no," he said, staring at the light-filled doorway. "We have to go, we have to go NOW!"

Dean grabbed his arm, shoving him to one side as a figure materialised within the white brilliance, moving slowly into the room. Behind him, he heard Jerome's harshly indrawn breath, and he looked at the doorway, eyes slitted almost shut against the searingly bright light, unable to see more detail.

The light died. The figure standing a couple of feet from the open closet door was a woman, tall and voluptuous, thick red hair gathered on the crown of her head in a smooth chignon, sprays and blotches of red staining her elegant grey silk cocktail dress. Cat-green eyes perused the room slowly then focussed on the man beside him.

"Henry, you naughty little man," she said, her voice low and musical, almost a purr. "Trying to run? You left the path open."

"Dean –"

Dean kept his gaze on the woman as he heard Jerome's voice behind him. Next to him, the man in his grasp shook his head.

"Josie, I know you're in there, you have to fight it."

"Dean – the situation room," Jerome said, his voice strengthening and getting louder.

"Josie's all tied up, Henry," the woman said with a wide, bright smile. "Give me the key and I promise to make it quick."

Sam glanced at Rufus, seeing the hunter's shoulder gradually hardening. He wasn't sure, later, what gave them away, but they hadn't really begun to move before the woman lifted her hands, fingers outstretched, and he was flung backwards, pinned to the wall just under the ceiling, opening his eyes and seeing Rufus held the same way on the opposite wall.

"Now, now," the woman chided, keeping her eyes on Henry. "All I want is Henry."

Demon, Dean thought, the shock of it being inside the order held back for later consideration. He knew what Jerome was suggesting, now. Turning his head slightly as he tightened his grip on the man's arm, he caught the tap of the scholar's finger on the arm of his wheelchair in the corner of his vision.

"Josie Sands, isn't it?" Jerome said, and the demon's eyes moved to him, Dean shoving the man violently ahead of him and through the door as Sam and Rufus dropped to the floor.

"Wh-where-wha–" the man sputtered as he was forced into a run along the hall.

Dean accelerated, greater weight and height pushing Henry fast past the other offices and into the library. He could hear the click of the woman's heels behind them, and the man in front of him finally seemed to understand that they were running, as they flashed past the tables and down the steps.

Yanking him to a halt next to the situation table, Dean turned, the bone handle of Ruby's knife warm in his fingers. The woman slowed slightly as she came past the tables and to the broad, shallow steps dividing the rooms.

"You can run, but you can't hide," she said, smiling at the sight of the knife and strolling down to the situation room.

Her foot touched the smooth, tiled floor and she took two strides into the room when from the ceiling and floor, the mechanism erupted, iron bars surrounding her and a delicate cage of gold and copper wire dropping down over them. Dean let go of the man in front of him, sheathing the knife casually as he looked at the dawning realisation on her face. She twisted around, hands raised, unable to touch the bounds of the cage, her expression contorting into rage.

"You might be able to hold me here," she spat at him as he walked closer. "But you can't kill me!"

"Well, we'll see about that," he told her, turning back to the man. "So, who the fuck are you?"

Henry leaned back against the table, his eyes on the demon. "Henry Winchester," he said. "I need to see my son, John."


End file.
